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BT Fiber Infrastructure Plans 'Fatal' To Competition
twoheadedboy writes "BT today revealed it is to start selling its Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) for fiber broadband product to other providers later this month, but the announcement was met with one particularly cold response. Geo Networks, which is helping deliver superfast networks in Wales in partnership with the Welsh Assembly, said it was going to withdraw bidding for Government-provided BDUK funds and in all next-generation access sales. 'Inadequacies of the current PIA product are fatal to infrastructure competition,' he added. 'The Government's stated desire for a competitive market in the provision of new optical fiber infrastructure is at risk of complete failure.'"
BT is willing to charge very little for the fibre to the customer but gouges on the fibre backhaul to the provider network. if the rest of the players had any balls they would walk out too.
without backhaul fibre is pointless. same thing in canada with Bell charging very little per customer for 3rd party ISPs but charging $22,000 per gigE for backhaul. same set of monopolistic thieves keeping the internet at crappy levels in first world countries.
BT, the incumbent monopoly for telecoms, is going to sell its fibre broadband to other internet providers. This is excellent news for UK consumers. BT are probably only complying with OFCOM regulations (BT are not a charity), but it's still a step in the right direction.
If one company (Geo Networks) is hurt by something that will benefit the vast majority of the population of the UK, so be it. We need to stop mindlessly putting the needs of corporations ahead of the needs of individuals.
Competition can be assured if BT offers PIA services at exactly the same price to other companies as to its internal users. One way to do that transparently is to split of the PIA provider and to have it offer access at equal terms to all (including BT). Another more difficult manner is through rather invasive and expensive regulation.
What's the spelling? It's a UK story, with the correct spelling in TFA, posted during UK breakfast time, probably of little interest to Americans, so what's up the spelling? Stop burning a hole my eyes.
I believe that, if BT are rolling it out, it's likely to be 'fibre' and not 'fiber'.
BT fibre is indeed harmful to the competition. The competition being Virgin fibre. The good news is, there will no longer be a monopoly on fibre. The bad news is, those of us who do not have Virgin fibre, and live in broadband notspots, will not see any BT fibre either. Again, this is for the purposes of competition. BT have actually said they will roll out fibre to my exchange by March next year. However, the fine print says that "rolling out fibre" to the exchange means just that; to the exchange. The fibre itself will only run to select cabinets, in my case, only 50% of them. Guess which ones? The ones that already have streets cabled with Virgin fibre, so they can poach Virgin customers. BT already get my £15 per month for the abysmal 0.7mbps they provide, and have no interest in bringing me a better service since I am already paying them.
It's not like BT are the only company that can provide fibre here in the UK anyway, Virgin Media already offer it. It might be interesting if Virgin were to start offering their backhaul to other companies too (I don't know if they do this or not).
I also received an email from my current ISP (Be Unlimited) yesterday about their plans for offering a fibre service and trials they are planning to do, involving putting their own kit into BT exchanges (much like how they did unbundled ADSL way back when).
In any case, I'm still on 10mbps ADSL, and am happy with the speeds, they are more than adequate for my heavier-than-average usage. Whilst fibre would be a good long-term investment, I don't see a neccessity for the speeds at can offer right now, especially given it is currently usually offerred with a usage cap and/or heavy traffic management of non-HTTP(S) traffic.
Also, I work for local government in London, and our experience with Geo is they are a litigation troll.
Im on Virgin Media and im happy with the 50Mbps service. It has its own fibre network so BT have no say.
Virgin Media is the culmination of a load of old ISP's and cable TV suppliers including NTL, Telewest, & ITV digital to name a few
There is no such thing as "BT". There is "BT Retail", which rents phonelines and is an ISP. Then there is "BT Wholesale", which provides infrastructure to ISPs, including BT Retail, but also many others.
For ADSL, that works quite well: "BT" (retail) talk to BT Wholesale in the same way that other ADSL providers do, allowing competition. The only issue is that small ISPs find it hard to compete with the big ones, because of the big jump in price bands between having a few customers, and having a few more.
BT retail has a shitty broadband service (throttling, IP address allocation issues, and so on), so no pros are interested in their fibre. BT Wholesale's fibre SHOULD be another story, and fibre provided via other ISPs like BeThere SHOULD be fine... except that BeThere don't offer fibre yet, for some reason.
So what's the setup for fibre? How come other ISPs aren't able to pick this up and sell it to customers? Is fibre not required to be provided wholesale? Is it being sold by BT Wholesale in a way that favors BT Retail over other providers? If so, these are issues that Ofcom should be taking VERY seriously.
This has been incredibly annoying for me. Originally it was supposed to be in my region last November, then March, now it's due for March next year. Even considering that, I've no way of knowing if they're going to roll it out to my cabinet.
Also annoying is that most of the LLU companies don't yet offer fibre services. O2/Be have been pretty great, no noticable throttling, no bandwidth limits, best uptime I've experienced from a broadband provider but they don't have any plans at the moment to offer fibre. Still, at least it means I won't be forced to use their awful router which they randomly remote into and reset my DNS settings (O2's DNS servers are shockingly bad).
BT are shit. Overpriced, poor performance, awful customer service. Fuck them.
I couldnt care less about BT untill the day BT will come into Hull. Hull the one place in the UK where there is a true ISP monopoly. We have KC (Kingston Communications) in Hull and they have an agreement with BT so they wont ever come into Hull. All the other ISP's need a BT line, but I live in Hull with a KC line so I am stuck paying £30(broadband) + £10 (line rental) + £30 (landline) + £25 (sky TV), a total £95 a month for a 2.5Mbps service. If I moved 10 miles down the road I could get Broadband, TV, Phone and line rental for £25 a month from sky. What makes it worse is ofcom dont even care about this despite the several thousand strong campaign against this a year ago.
I live in Hull, I dont want to pay £95 a month for services I can get any where else in the UK for £25 a month.
"Geo Networks, which is helping deliver superfast networks in Wales in partnership with the Welsh Assembly,"...
The Welsh Assembly is aiming for more political power, and it wants its own comms network, that can't be "controlled" from London (ie The English). Just another example of Welsh Nationalism/xenophobia.
wow.... way to try to turn it into something it's not.
you do realise the there is a coalition in power in the Welsh Assembly don't you?
Plaid Cymru(nationalist) and Labour(Westminster based Party) so your point is moot and just shows your OWN political leaning.
just because something is positive for the Welsh and originates from the Welsh Assembly doesn't mean it's anti-English or negative
and no i am NOT Welsh, i am Scottish but we get the same crap when our Parliament does it's job in looking after the people here.
if you don't like it.... do what we did, campaign for your own devolved parliament and stop whining about how successfully the devolved parliaments are doing their job for their electorate
Is a government controlled network better than a government created network that privately owned companies fight over to then resell to the people that payed to have it built? It seems to me that having the money go directly back to the government so it can be invested in more infrastructure would be better than having the government spend money to control the companies fighting over the lines. The U.S. went through all this to break up AT&T. Tax payer dollars built the phone network. It was privatized. It became a monopoly. Now we have to pay government employees to deal with every little problem that pops up when phone companies don't play fair.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
How about you stick to the story at hand, it's not tax 'dollars' it's Pounds Sterling, and BT had long since paid back the British taxpayer for the outlay prior to it being privatised (in terms more than just money, think security during the cold war for one). Labelling an ac an astroturfer when you clearly have a political axe to grind is just hilarious at best.
P.S. I think the way BT abuse their monopoly is outrageous, but the issue is NOT how that monopoly came about, it's the actions of those that are the controlling minds of BT that are at issue.
Sigh, you mean laws that mean people can't end up being at the receiving end of an autonomous unchallengable unfair firing? This is something that people in the UK right now are rather glad of since it gives them just a little bit more job security than they would have if employers were able to treat their 'human resource' like so much chattel?
The political axegrinders are out in force today.
Not because of the bad service.
"you do realise the there is a coalition in power in the Welsh Assembly don't you?"
Don't I know it just.
Welsh Labour and Plaid are two faces of the same coin. Labour in Wales has little allegiance to London, they're after the same electorate as Plaid and can't be seen to have any links to England. Anyhow, Scotland is devolving into pretty much a one-party state, and Wales is employing linguistic apartheid. Small minds think alike...