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Wednesday 9 February 2011

Testbed by 'new entrants' deposes BT as FTTH leaders in UK

This type of headline, methinks, is going to become ever more common now. BSkyB and TalkTalk are going for a test bed of 3600 homes for a FTTH trial in Harrow. They are not alone in pursuing FTTH -it is a natural extension to existing products - but others are steering clear of the press release/promo route, it seems, and are flying under the radar until solutions are in place, tested and saleable.

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


Ebbsfleet, the much vaunted BT FTTH 'experiment', has connected how many since it was first announced about 3 or more years ago??

Anyone responsible for allocating public funding to next gen access should be watching this type of 'new entrant' announcement very closely. There are new players making the most of incumbent lassitude, and claiming ignorance of their existence when you allocate funds will be no excuse.

There are, perhaps, a considerable number of players wandering around this conference ready to upset the cosy position of the incumbent in the UK by....

JFDI.

Public money must be put into innovative solutions, because otherwise it is likely to be thrown away on olde schoole solutions and providers who have become a little too comfy in their position to realise the world is evolving without them. Fund olde worlde solutions and your constituents will hold you accountable for lumbering them with last gen solutions, surely?



3 comments:

Somerset said...

Is this significant - 'The project will help to better understand the technical and commercial aspects of the next stage of the planned BT Openreach fibre roll-out, which will be based on fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology'.

chris said...

the problem as I see it in the UK is that the incumbent is saying to the councils allocating funding 'we can provide superfast broadband without digging up your pavements at election time' and so instead of going for futureproof NGA fibre the councils go for copper cabinets. This is totally wrong, because the funding was meant for the final third, not urban areas getting a quick fix of slightly faster speeds.
It will be the election after that - ie in the next decade where people will finally realise they have been conned, and their councils, rdas, leps, etc have let them down. The people accountable will have retired, and we have to start all over again.
Cornwall has fallen for it, i think lancashire has too. Our only hope is Cumbria. Maybe they have men and women of grit on the council. At least they have an MP who gets IT, maybe he can wake up the dinosaurs.
chris

Somerset said...

chris - how will people 'realise they have been conned'?

Is BT saying about digging up pavements at election time? Have you just made this up? Any rollout will be after the May elections.

Surely the main issue, maybe the only issue, is the cost of digging compared with the take up. It may be £1000/property but for an area is more if the take up is low.