Never mind falling revenues, BT watchers, look at the footy offering

Thursday 30th July 2015 12:33 GMT Gavin Chester

Really...

Quote:

"It now reaches around 80 per cent of all UK premises and we will work with government to help take fibre broadband to 95 per cent of the country by the end of 2017"

How about replacing the lousy Ali cable that seems to litter so many 1960's estates and wreck BB speed for so many people, or at the very least put fibre to the cabinets that are affected, so people have a chance of double digit speeds, not the 0.5 to 2mbits that they tend to get.

And yes this is from personal experience, my mother lives less than 6 miles from a major city, in a large village of 5k plus houses, but due to the way BT put the wires in get a 1.5 on a really good day, and more often 1mbit, and frequent connection drops.

4 0 Reply
1. Thursday 30th July 2015 13:29 GMT TheVogon
  
  Re: Really...
  
  Apparently you need to have BT Internet service to take their TV! That's a show stopper for me.
  
  The regulator should force Virgin, BT and Sky to unbundle their packages. For instance I'm forced to have a Virgin phone line (that really is virgin as it hasn't ever had a phone plugged into it!) because my TV would be more expensive without it - even if I don't use it!
  
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  1. Thursday 30th July 2015 18:29 GMT An0n C0w4rd
    
    Re: Really...
    
    "Apparently you need to have BT Internet service to take their TV!"
    
    Not exactly a surprise. They can properly manage delivery of the service over their network (anything not picked up off Freeview is sent over IP). QoS and other stuff which allow you to prioritise delivery stops the second a packet leaves your network. Plus paying other broadband customers to deliver your TV service probably isn't in their model.
    
    I have a sky box and it's plugged in to my home network, but I only let it through the firewall when I want to download a program. I don't want the damned thing sending/receiving data when I'm trying to do other stuff on my crappy bandwidth (the service itself is excellent, for a 10 year old tech, i.e. ADSL2+. pity NeverReach don't want to extend FTTC or FTTP to my street, and I'm not holding my breath for G.Fast to appear any time soon)
    
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    1. Friday 31st July 2015 08:20 GMT NeilPost
      
      Re: Really...
      
      Why don;t you put some traffic monitoring on your Sky box with something like Wireshark, to see what little traffic it will generate, so you have an objective view on this, as opposed to subjective tin hat brigade speculation.
      
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  2. Friday 31st July 2015 08:17 GMT NeilPost
    
    Re: Really...
    
    No you don't, you can get BT Sports via Sky's satallite platform.
    
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2. Friday 31st July 2015 08:17 GMT NeilPost
  
  Re: Really...
  
  ... who do you expect to pay for it ??
  
  If it was that commercially iable, Virgin Media, Talk-Talk and Sky would have already dug the road up and put their own infrastructure in. You hear inordinate amounts of whining, mostly from the first 2 companies, but little putting their hands in their pockets to provide any infrastructure. As with private postal services, if there is no margin in it, you can effectively f**k-off, and Whistl for it :-)
  
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Thursday 30th July 2015 13:00 GMT Disgruntled of TW

It is NOT fibre ...

... and STOP with the ridiculous "homes passed" statistic.

Taking fibre from the exchange to the cabinet does not provide fibre optic broadband to everyone with a telephone line on the cabinet. You still have copper and you need to have an available port on the DSLAM. BT aren't putting enough DSLAM ports in the cabinets to cater for all the lines, especially in rural areas. They are taking BDUK funding (£1.2b) and telling MPs that a "home passed" has "access to fibre optic broadband" without explaining the lack of capacity and reachability of the VDSL technology (~1.2Km), and the oft discussed G.Fast technology which has less than 500m of useful range.

Utter poppycock. I might as well say I have access to teleportation - it just remains for me to invent it and create the portal.

Unfortunately, DCMS believes all that BT lay before them. They need to smarten up.

4 0 Reply
1. Thursday 30th July 2015 18:20 GMT An0n C0w4rd
  
  Re: It is NOT fibre ...
  
  I know of a company which laid high speed Internet cables through some of the poorest areas of a given city just to pump up the "homes passed" figures. The people couldn't afford the basic service, let alone all the other stuff they were selling. It was mostly a waste of money, but it appeared good to investors.
  
  The metric needs to be retired and replaced with something more meaningful which indicates the ability of the residents in the premises passed by a cable to actually afford one or more of the services provided.
  
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  1. Friday 31st July 2015 08:23 GMT NeilPost
    
    Re: It is NOT fibre ...
    
    If you are unhappy with Openreach, perhaps you should approach Vodafone to provide some FTTP to your house, with their extensive fibre network they have in the UK, They obtained this from their acquisition of Cable and Wireless Over 20,000 miles according to this report on the takeover in 2012. They could have used some of this for BDUK, where they did not bid for *any* contracts.
    
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17810568
    
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2. Thursday 30th July 2015 20:25 GMT JetSetJim
  
  Re: It is NOT fibre ...
  
  "homes passed" is just shorthand for "homes passed by"
  
  1 0 Reply
  1. Friday 31st July 2015 07:24 GMT iDavid
    
    Re: It is NOT fibre ...
    
    +1. Green cabinets at either end of my London street yet stuck on copper as I have a 'direct' line to the exchange. So yes, def a home passed by here.
    
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Friday 31st July 2015 06:51 GMT Anonymous Coward

... and still I am explaining to people that they done HAVE to take fibre via BT retail. Why do people think this is the only route? Im sure some of the growth is down to this misconception.

I note a number of people on a few forums saying they are ditching BT over the latest price hikes as they dont do sports and resent being fleeced to pay for it, they stole Moto GP from fans and many like me just stopped watching. The cost is too much when you factor in the OTT cost of BT line rental on top of the "nominal cost" of the TV service.

I dont do landline calls so why am I paying to maintain voice equipment that I dont want or need? I pay for the xDSL stuff I use In my ISP charges. The ancient copper pair of dubious quality gets little or no attention, and clealy should cost quite a bit less to maintain as a stand

alone with no PSTN connection needed.

Im sure that broadband only users are being fleeced to prop up BT Group for the loss of revenue to the PSTN voice revenue.

Time to split it up.

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1. Friday 31st July 2015 06:59 GMT Pete4000uk
  
  Moto GP
  
  Ilm worried about what will happen to the F1 rights when they come up again...
  
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2. Friday 31st July 2015 08:26 GMT NeilPost
  
  Sky of course have not put their prices up on over 10 years !!!
  
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/competitions/premier-league/11482477/Sky-announce-price-hike-despite-saying-fans-would-not-not-foot-bill-to-watch-football-after-new-4bn-contract.html
  
  http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/utilities/2015/03/sky-tv-customers-to-be-hit-with-price-hikes
  
  ... of perhaps they just have !!!
  
  0 1 Reply
3. Friday 31st July 2015 08:40 GMT NeilPost
  
  Split up BT/Openreach like other former monopolies or stuff regulated by Government
  
  Electricity generation and supply... well, that went well
  
  Railways, infrastucture and services.... ... well, that went well
  
  Gas production and supply, .... ... well, that went well
  
  Financial Services... .... ... well, that went well
  
  Water, production and supply...... ... well, that went well
  
  etc..............
  
  Careful what you ask for, as you might get it... as the idiom says.
  
  Challenge to Sky, Talk-Talk, and to a lesser extent Vodafone.... stop whining about Openreach, and provide some f**king infrastructure yourselves !!!???!!!
  
  1 2 Reply
  1. Friday 31st July 2015 09:53 GMT Oh Matron!
    
    I could not agree with this more.
    
    BT invest in R&D (still), enabling technologies like Ethernet for the last mile and a whole host of other stuff. If BT Openreach was floated off, not only would BT have no reason to invest in this R&D any more, BT would end up with a huge cash pile (That no one seems to have spoken about), allowing them to splurge on a whole host of stuff.
    
    Sky are not doesn't this for the regular punter, they are pushing for this for their own benefits
    
    Be VERY careful what you ask for....
    
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Friday 31st July 2015 08:01 GMT johnaaronrose

FTTP?

Can somebody tell me how to get FTTP? Currently, I have FTTC.

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1. Friday 31st July 2015 08:31 GMT NeilPost
  
  Re: FTTP?
  
  To get FTTP, you will need to pay BT loads of money to deliver a business grade fibre connection.
  
  ... unless you live in some very specifric new estates, where it is being chucked in the ground whilst infrastructure services are being laid.... or some trial parts of BDUK in Cornwall, where they are trialing hanging it off the telegraph poles.
  
  .. Even when you get decent fibre, the internet is still sh1t3 slow, with webpages slow because they are aggregating loads of bollocks from remote servers like Google Analytics, Adwords, Flash advertising, numerous other tracking crap. Install Ad Block Plus and Ghostery, to get on top of this stuff that really slows down your browsing experience.
  
  Oh, and if you laptop still runs wireless G, it is slower to your fibre Infinity than the hub is to the exchange/internet.
  
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  1. Sunday 2nd August 2015 18:50 GMT Disgruntled of TW
    
    Re: FTTP?
    
    @NeilPost If you recall the entire debacle that is BDUK, you would realise that nobody has the commercial capability to compete with BT/OpenReach because of the way the funding framework is designed. Only the incumbent with the last mile copper had ANY hope of winning our tax money. The BDUK participants went from 10 down to 2, with Fujitsu fading into insignificance in the light of DCMS sucking up the "homes passed" rubbish, and endless definitions of "Super Fast" to ensure that VDSL2 qualified irrespective of distance from the cabinet or copper/aluminium line quality.
    
    There really isn't any choice, so long as OpenReach owns the last mile. A vague glimmer of hope in B4RN up in Lancashire is being largely ignored by our government, where communities have demonstrated how to fund, deploy and manage *REAL* FTTP - dedicated fibre to every household. Utterly future proof. Not a G.PON in sight.
    
    As for asking BT for FTTP, I did. My village switch was upgraded recently to FTTC, so I called up and said "money is no object, can you quote me for FTTP please". They said, "no, never ... we have no plans for your exchange". I guess rural areas remain "commercially unviable" for BT ... until they get more of our tax money and they decide when that time comes, not our government.
    
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