Ofcom chisels away at BT Openreach's cold, dead hands

Re: Stupid

Agreed this should be universal - but you miss the fact that BT / Open Reach already has ducting across the whole of the UK, Virgin on the other hand only has a small percentage. Additional most "Altcomms" down have their own ducting or infrastructure, they simply resell BT services or rely upon them to provide last mile and backhaul.

So the they are simply making the 1 "simple" change that will have the most impact..

Just saying - I don't agree or disagree either way. Fact is we're still in a better position than most of the US ;)

Re: Stupid

Letting BT's monopoly steal Virgin's fibre-only customers sounds a great plan!

And then, obviously, what they'll do is sink millions into cabling up a couple of streets that weren't served by either company anyway, just to give people faster speeds at prices that they won't recoup the money from in decades (*).

I think you forget that, apart from new builds that pay for it, the only "cabled" areas in the country were put in by a company that went bankrupt and was bought out by Virgin for a pittance. Everything else is BT / Openreach over cables that have been there for 50 years and/or you have to pay quite a lot to install a new line.

And the rest of the "fibre", even on BT, is not really fibre at all. It's VDSL or DOCSIS 3 with a fibre backend. Unless you have a leased line and paid through the nose to install it, you're not getting fibre anyway (I know - I've bought three of them for workplaces, they aren't cheap but they are real fibre).

(* Do the maths - a leased line install to a cabinet costs on the region of £10k for the install alone.

Connecting that cab to the nearest cab/exchange costs the same because it's all wayleave and digging pipes, not the actual thing you lay inside them.

That cabinet will happily serve the street, if you dig the entire streeet up or run phone lines to every house, costing a lot more than £10k.

And you want to pay, what, even £50 a month? How much of that goes to the people who put in the infrastructure rather than the ISP? Less than a quarter? That's going to take them something like 2000-5000 monthly payments alone just to get their install money back, not counting ongoing costs and actually providing the service to you. How many houses in your street? 50? That means either every house for 10 years, guaranteed, or most of the houses for, say, 20 years. JUST TO RECOUP INSTALL COSTS.

There's a reason nobody wants to pay to connect up people, especially in rural areas where you run 10s of km of cable to service a handful of people. It just doesn't scale without massive subsidies)

BT's infrastructure?

The buildings, wayleaves, and ducting are for the most part, taxpayer's infrastructure, built in the years between the nationalisation of private phone companies in 1912 (with the major exception of Kingston-upon-Hull) into the General Post Office, and the privatisation of BT in 1984.

Quoting Wikipedia: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Post_Office#Telephone )

"The Post Office commenced its telephone business in 1878, however the vast majority of telephones were initially connected to independently run networks. In December 1880, the Post Master General obtained a court judgement that telephone conversations were, technically, within the remit of the Telegraph Act. The General Post Office then licensed all existing telephone networks.

The effective nationalisation of the UK telecommunications industry occurred in 1912 with the takeover of the National Telephone Company which left only a few municipal undertakings independent of the GPO (in particular Hull Telephones Department and the telephone system of Guernsey)."

The state-owned assets were transferred to the statutory corporation, British Telecommunications by the British Telecommunications Act 1981. This statutory corporation was privatised in 1984.

You can argue that 'stuff' bought by BT since 1984 is not a taxpayer asset (33 year's worth), but the telephone exchange buildings, ducting, and probably most importantly, the wayleaves were mostly obtained and built in the government owned and controlled era (1912 - 1984).

When competition was allowed, Mercury Communications had to get ducting and wayleaves - so laying fibre alongside railways (where you only had to negotiate with one landowner) was one technique they used, as well as buying the London Hydraulic Power Company for its system of pipework (and wayleaves) covering a lot of the city. Later on Energis put fibre on the same pylons that carried the high-voltage power transmission network - again for wayleave reasons. A wayleave is a very good example of an intangible asset that can be worth rather a lot. BT sit on a huge pile of wayleaves and freeholds obtained when it was a government (taxpayer owned) entity.

All new development, whether residential or business, really ought to incorporate ducting and communications rooms that are statutorily available to all - a bit like the road network.

From the evidence of their past decade of studied inaction, it must be BT.

Re: It's not a level playing field...

"There needs to be a mandated directive - zero tax payer payments to further funding of any copper based investment in BT."

This is more-or-less what was done in New Zealand to force the splitting of the incumbent into a lines company and a dialtone/connections company.

The problem isn't BT as such, the problem is that the commas market is dominated by a vertical monopoly with control of both infrastructure and retail with a vested interest in preventing any competition in the retail level.

ALL the arguments against splitting BT were advanced against splitting Telecom NZ (which isn't strange - TCNZ tried to sell the BT/Openreach model to NZ regulators as the way forward, to the stage of aping the same setup) and ALL those arguments were proven fallaciious (especially the pensions liability claims).

The real problem is Ofcom - as a technical regulator they're passable but as a competition and markets authority they're both decidedly lacking in teeth and arguably massively duplicating an existing regulator.

This was also proven in New Zealand when the Commerce regulator stepped in, documented the level of damage that TCNZ's monopoly was doing to NZ's GDP AND what BT was doing to the UK GDP (percentagewise, about the same - 3-5% - it adds up to hundreds of billions each year) and put its foot down, refusing to let TCNZ use the BT/Openreach sham in New Zealand.

Re: Newsites FTTP & BDUK

This. Many times over....

I also feel that, for sites 30 or more, Virgin should be forced to lay coax, given that they'd have only the cost of coax (and backhaul, obviously), thus giving customers at least *some* competition.

Re: Wrong Direction

Sky was using free broadband to take customers from BT – very successfully. BT had a choice: die, or compete. It chose the latter. There was no alternative to BT TV. You are however correct to identify that current broadband issues originate from around that time. Because of the Ofcom-endorsed constant downward pressure on prices, including Sky giving broadband away for free with Sky Sports, it has been a race to the bottom for both prices and quality; there has been precious little money to invest in new infrastructure. Consequently, the copper network has been poorly-maintained, but more egregiously there has been no case for incremental FTTP: in other words, because people refuse to pay more than £30–40 per month for their broadband, there is no business case to replace copper lines with FTTP lines. If there were an investment case for this, do you not think that other companies would have done so? In fact, of course, many companies have cherry-picked in central urban areas, but the vast majority of the UK remains without FTTP, without there being any prospect of this changing in the future.

We also have the advantage of being able to look to NBN in Austrialia, where delusional visions of FTTP also met commercial and technical realities, and the 'all-fibre' aspirations with which the programme started have been replaced by more achievable goals.

FTTP is like first class airline travel: everyone says they want it, but when you ask them if they are willing to pay for it...