High Cost of Converting UK To High-Speed Broadband

Smivs notes a BBC report on a government study toting up the high cost of converting the UK to high speed broadband, which could exceed £28.8 B ($52.5 B). The options examined range from fiber to the neighborhood, providing 30-100 Mbps connections for a total cost of £5.1 B ($9.3 B), up to individual fiber to the home offering 1 Gbps to each household at a cost of £28.8 B. England's rural areas could pose tough choices. In the lowest-cost, fiber-to-the-neighborhood scenario, "The [group] estimates that getting fiber to the cabinets near the first 58% of households could cost about £1.9 B. The next 26% would cost about £1.4 B and the final 16% would cost £1.8 B."

Comments

The cost is peanuts

[Kupfernigk]

One major UK problem is the Government's feeble approach to infrastructure. When the Conservatives complain that privatising it has been too expensive, you know a supposedly Labour government has got it wrong. However, the quoted cost for neighbourhood fibre is less than the cost of just making the railway line between London and Glasgow work, or of staging that ultimate willy-waggling folly the Olympics. Which do you want the UK to be in 20 years - South Korea or Portugal?

Disclaimer: here where we are in the UK we have cable. And HSDPA. And we get much more bandwidth to Marin County or Cupertino, CA than we do to North London, UK, or to the non-cable equipped BT supplied town eight miles away. It isn't just rural areas; the whole BT infrastructure badly needs fixing, and there is no way that the company that until recently said the Internet would be a passing fad is going to do the job properly.

The UK is larger than England...

[hmallett]

England's rural areas could pose tough choices

I would imagine that the rural areas of Scotland and maybe Wales would pose tougher choices, as they are also in the UK.

BT is ineffectual.

[fialar]

There is a simple explanation of all this. BT is one of the most inept companies in the UK. I used to work for a DSL provider in the UK and had to deal with BT Wholesale all the time, who, in turn had to deal with BT OpenReach. It's a complete and utter mess thanks to the UK Gov't privatising and stifling actual competition.

Add to that, I've seen cases where a new customer signs up for ADSL. If that customer isn't a BT Broadband customer, BT OpenReach will "mysteriously" switch their copper to the cross-wired/noisy pair and miraculously, the BT Broadband customer will have the quietest lines!

It's a complete mess.

Probably actually aluminum cables

[Kupfernigk]

In fact it almost certainly wasn't fibre. BT experimented with a lower cost aluminium cabling system for a while for POTS. This is what they probably meant. The aluminium cables are so low bandwidth they cannot handle ADSL. In fact, one or two large corporations were caught out like this including npower, who found they could not get ADSL to their HQ in Worcester.

I can assure you that if there was cable in your area with FTTK, BT would be the very last people in the world to tell you. A Telewest salesman once told me that Telewest liked to employ people who had actually been sacked by BT rather than being made redundant, because redundant employees still believed one day they might get their jobs back, and so didn't want to sell against BT. The attitude Telewest liked was the guy who, in WW2 fighter style, put a little telephone sticker on his car every time he managed to move a business away from BT.

Re:Just do it, already.

[FridgeFreezer]

BT are too busy spending £12bn converting the core network to IP (dubbed "21CN" - 21st Century network). None of the current core networks are up to the growing load of existing broadband, never mind stuff 10x or 100x faster.