BT hit with £42m fine for Ethernet compensation delays to competitors BT has been smacked with a £42m penalty for its failure via Openreach to compensate other telecoms providers for delays to fixing leased line "Ethernet" services, in a decision from Ofcom today. As a result of the investigation, BT said it estimates it will pay an additional £300m in compensation to the affected communications …
That this news comes out shortly AFTER a decision is made not to completely split BT from Openreach, one may ponder why it wasn't announced just a few weeks ago where it would have been seen as a fairly damning indictment of the way the two work together (but totally don't, no way, not at all.)
Agree. Just another headache for BT, albeit hitting them in a back pocket that's already hurting from Corporate Fraud in its European Operation. Would be interesting to start bidding for FFTC and revoking the Line Rental mandate on BB providers. The monopoly has been going on too long.
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A bit like Amazon regards Sales Tax, you can keep fighting tooth and nail with Gov legislation, but eventually you just end up so wrapped up in red tape.
It probably would have been better for BT/Openreach to just agree to start a headline rollout of pure FTTP on lines longer than 500m by copper pair (250m-Crow Flies), instead of gouging older tech Ethernet lines for those business customers (set actual targets, not Ofcom approved averaged wishy washy lame data across both rural/urban, to make rural figures look pretty).
You know BT, you might actually get some Good PR from that.
The biggest problem with G.fast is it's anti-competitive compared to FTTP and it doesn't scale (it's fully sweated copper tech with low upper limits), especially regards upload speeds. Bonding copper lines might sweat things a bit more, but the whole thing just becomes an unreliable mess (in terms of time wasted) when scaled across millions of customers.
If we thought things were bad now (and that Ofcom decision has taken 3 years), wait till "up to" Obfuscated, Bamboozled G.fast hits the real world.
We're heading for an absolute nightmare in terms of the blame game. Sharon White + others obviously don't feel they're paid enough to take on the real separation of BT (i.e. Openreach Assets) they like the easy life too much.
I personally have no faith in "G.fast obsessed" Openreach's Clive Selley, (I feel he has been parachuted in by BT Group, G.fast was his baby) though hope he proves me wrong.
Simply, G.fast plans need to be ditched. It's obsolete technology,
Bonding copper lines might sweat things a bit more, but the whole thing just becomes an unreliable mess (in terms of time wasted) when scaled across millions of customers.
Too right. Here in Nameless European Country, we have two bonded copper pairs giving us 100Mbps down and 50 up (true figures). And yet another warm box with blinkenlights in the service cupboard. Silly thing is, FTTP arrived the following year, but the provider won't put in the final 2m of connection between the termination and out router unless we want to shell out for more capacity (or less latency — but, if I asked for that, the help desk would not know how to react) than the copper will provide.
Well I can safely say that British Telecom (before that GPO), were terrible before being privatised, You were lucky if you got a phone line installed in less than 6 months. Repairs took months and investment prior to being sold off was all but non-existant. Charges were astronomicaly and you really did have a monopoly situation.
Trains were ancient and rarely arrived on time (not everyone has to suffer Southern). Cancellations were the norm, strikes were forever ongoing and the rolling stock was utterly shit (and smelt like it).
Not everything works well, but rose tinted glasses and all that.
Natural monopolies will always act as such, so it is way better to have then under strict laws and control. At that point, it is just better for them to be part of government, because private industry has nothing to offer, not having a say on policies.
The rail only makes sense as a fully public or fully private (as in we dont care about the good of society, only profit) business... smae for water utilities, and power utilities.
I have yet to see a country that made power utilities private and got cheaper prices and incresed reliability. It is simply impossible, the companies will always try to charge as much as possible while saving on reliability as much as they can get away with.. there is no magic,
Now, things like car manufacturers, or plane manufacturers.. that is different. They will still try to form cartels, but they are not completely natural cartels.
I'm still waiting for a review on how the privatisation experiment has worked out.
Here are some reminders about BT:
* I remember seeing stickers on phones urging you NOT to make phone calls.
* There were different call rates for morning and afternoon.
* You couldn't own a phone, just rent one.
I'm assuming that government is evidence based so that it can learn from past successes and mistakes. Isn't it?
Hahahahahahahaha.
Go and ask David Nutt. When he presented evidence to the government that their drugs policy was not based on scientific evidence, what did they do? Fire him.
Or what about the infamous Iragi WMD fiasco. Bugger all evidence that there were any, but they still sent in troops to topple Saddam to remove his non-existent WMDs.
Remember, all a government cares about is staying in power. It has little interest in doing what's best.
Oh how ironic. It was around that time (winter of '12/'13) that I was helping get fibre installed to our office park. I thought it was a bit naff how they suddenly extended our go live date by two months. I forget what their excuse was but I remember I thought it was lame.
The irony is that six months later I was made redundant when the office was closed down and I notice now that the village it was part of now has FTTC and we'd have been happy just with that.
Unfortunately as with all corporate fines it will just be placed into the 'operating expenses' column and most likely paid for by customers.
Still, it does you good to laugh.
Unfortunately as with all corporate fines it will just be placed into the 'operating expenses' column and most likely paid for by customers.
Additionally, the fine itself will disappear into Ofcom benefiting none of the businesses inconvenienced...
If Ofcom had the sense they would put the fine into the connected cities pot and so smaller businesses can get grants for upgrading to fibre...
"Unfortunately as with all corporate fines it will just be placed into the 'operating expenses' column and most likely paid for by customers."
I wonder if anyone ever actually looks at the accounts for the year the fine is incurred to make the fine is in the loss column against the company dividends and prices didn't get an out of sequence hike?
Maybe the fine ought to be deferred until the next divi is due and cream it directly off that value?
Good timing.
I work at a school that spent THREE YEARS waiting for Openreach to install a leased line. Literally, they did nothing until the last months when I took over and ramped up the complaining, then they put empty fibre tubes all over the site (three different sections), then when it came time to blow the fibre, they said there was "no room at the exchange"... maybe in those three years someone could have checked and/or upgraded capacity? They never completed and we eventually blocked them from site because they kept trying to come back to "complete the install" after we cancelled the contract.
However, our new site has no choice but to use Openreach even if we specify Virgin as the vendor on our end. As such, we're expecting Openreach to drag their feet like they did for our first site. Maybe this will gee them up a bit, with a bit of prompting from Virgin (who we actually contract with).
"Maybe this will gee them up a bit, with a bit of prompting from Virgin (who we actually contract with)."
I was on site recently at a large city council HQ. Unrelated, but within earshot, was two council comms/IT guys, a BT engineer and a VM engineer. The jist of the conversation was that over the years both BT and VM had installed phone lines, depending on who had the contract at the time, but no one knew who owned this particular live phone point. It was a live, direct dial line. The council guy plugged in a phone and rang his own mobile from it to demostrate that it worked, but neither the BT nor VM guy was prepared to own up to "owning" that line. Both were ringing back to base but neither company seemed able to track the number or ownership of where this call was coming from or if it could, (or ever had been) billed. Sadly I had to leave site so don't know what happened, but at that stage it seemed neither BT nor VM were going to admit to this stealth phone line.
Personally I'd have rung the speaking clock in Australia and then just left the receiver off the hook and see how long it took for someone to notice :-)
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