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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.
It is anticompetitive because Geo and others need to use the PIA fibre from BT to 'backhaul' from a village to a larger town or city. With the backhaul, they can provide local connections, maybe using wireless - without the backhaul, BT actually provides the connections to ISPs for resale, hence there is far less competition.
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.
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.
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.