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Tuesday 5 October 2010

Race to Infinity?

Don't make me bloody laugh. An infinitely long wait for anything approaching what other countries have is what the latest BT marketing campaign will achieve for most.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Seen all this before. Look what the trigger levels did for huge swathes of the country? Kept us tied into a private company's infinitely slow roll-out of 'true broadband'. In fact, we still aren't there yet as few have a symmetrical connection, which is what is required to use the Net, services and applications.

I refuse point blank to link to the website promoting this farce. Anyone who registers on it instead of investigating the options for DIY FTTH is permitting a private company to lead this country into yet more years of broadband darkness. This type of data harvesting in private will lead many investors to hesitate to put money into a badly needed utility instead of JFDI.

Personally, I think that what is required is a concerted campaign to either
a) pull this website immediately OR take it from BT's greedy little paws and put it in the hands of an independent group who have the well-being of the nation not shareholders at heart

or b) insist that all data is made open access for all (exactly as any FTTH network should be) immediately the competition ends. After all, if these people want better broadband, they won't mind being contacted by EVERY COMPANY willing to get on and do it in their area, will they? It's called CHOICE. It's called a COMPETITIVE MARKET. And it's what every consumer in this country should have a right to.

In addition, what should be put on that site are links to every bit of news and information about FTTH that BT can lay its hands on to ensure that any website visitor is given full and unbiased knowledge about just what is feasible in this day and age without BT needing subsidies from the public purse. BT are gathering data from every single exchange in order to justify doing 5, which won't even be in the Final Third, which would have made the most sense to show the level of demand in rural areas and the true commercial viability of such exchanges.

AND there ought to a clearly laid out promise that BT will do ubiquitous FTTH, and not FTTC or BET, to any exchange area that it decides is viable from a 75% trigger.

Watch 2012 be the year that BT makes approaches to every regional source of funding declaring certain exchanges are not viable....



4 comments:

chris said...

well said. Infinity my arse. Its just a scam like in 2003/4 to get the communities to engage the punters and do the work unpaid and unthanked for the incumbent to march in, claim any subsidies and protect their copper cabal for another generation. We must make sure any public money spent is on fibre and not BET, and none of it goes into the profitable areas which would have been done anyway. (they should have been done years ago). For too long this country has been throttled and capped by a monopoly who sees its shareholders as priority. Bring on the reivers.
chris

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Taking Chris's comment further -

public money must be invested ONLY on the Fat Pipe side of Digital Village Pumps and nothing on the 1st Mile access networks themselves.

Government at a national level works best on solving problems that are common on a national scale.

Whereas each 1st Mile access network will be location-dependent as regards what particular technology choices are employed as interim steps, until the endgame of FttH is achieved.

Some will go straight to FttH, some will use FiWi or FiWiS to get there in stages.

There must be a credible framework to ensure that where intermediate steps are taken then the surpluses so generated are reinvested by law and not siphoned off to create Digital Deadends.

CIC is the way forwards, whether local or national in scale, to safeguard the local community from mercenary abuse of the inevitable natural monopoly that FttH represents.

The bottleneck of artificial scarcity once removed then opens up the possibility for local communities to truly benefit from the exaflood that fibre optics represents.

Cybersavvy UK said...

Found on El Reg:

Surely a race to infinity is one where the end will never get any nearer, and is thus ultimately pointless?