Convergence Conversation

Is BT Openreach living up to its obligations?

BT Openreach is an infrastructure division of the British telecommunications company BT Group. It was established in 2006 following an an agreement between BT and OFCOM to implement certain undertakings, pursuant to the Enterprise Act 2002, to ensure that rival telecom operators have equality of access to BT’s local network.

Back in September 2009 we blogged about how to range extend ADSL to reach Notspot locations using wireless relay technology, the Cu:Wi approach.

Some concerning news recently received from the former Notspot resident is that their initial ADSL ISP, a small independent, was unable to deliver enough speed from the ADSL feeder location to support BBC iPlayer. More...

Following successful deployment of SSB (Symmetric Superfast Broadband) service into the heart of Cumbria, NextGenUs is now readying the expansion of service into rural Lancashire notspots.

The NextGenUs Lancashire infrastructure builds upon the significant investment already made in Dark Fibre to serve Cumbria and will initially target the Lune Valley area in the north of the county where community demand for service is already sufficient to justify the business case without the need or risk of massive community investment required by other unproven schemes.

Construction of the additional network assets is now underway and it is anticipated that SSB service will become available during Q1 2012. More...

The original and authentic Fiberevolutionary, Benoit Felten has published an analysis par excellence that every scale of ISP, from incumbent to local start-up should download now,then absorb the content and consider how best to implement.

To quote the Executive Summary:

“In the last couple of years, the considerable growth in internet traffic has pushed an increasing number of internet service
providers (ISPs) around the world to implement strategies to limit the usage of broadband services by their customers.

Most of these strategies revolve around data caps: a level of monthly data consumption that triggers pay-as-you-go mechanisms at steep per megabyte rates.”

The report considers the effectiveness of current management strategies and provides great insight as to possible remedies. More...

With the withdrawal of some public subsidies for educational internet access and the ever-growing demand for more bandwidth, schools across the country are facing a real cost squeeze.

Pubs, Village Shops, Post Offices and Schools are all anchor institutions for rural communities, providing both service and a focal point for each local area.

As a not-for-profit social enterprise, NextGenUs UK CIC, in common with the other members of the NextGenUs democratic franchise, takes the community interest very seriously and is pleased to announce a radical offer to help community-minded local schools reduce their internet access costs drastically, with the genuine potential for free service!

This outcome is simply achieved by schools working together with NextGenUs to provide SSB (Symmetric Superfast Broadband) for the local community in exchange for a discount to the cost of school internet service in proportion to the percentage uptake b More...

In what may well prove to be a turning point for the better for delivering Digital Britain, GEO Networks Boss Chris Smedley has released a damning indictment of the gap-funded subsidy model that BDUK is desperately attempting to ram through increasingly reluctant local authorities.

This is the doomed-to-#FAIL BDUK model that Chris rightly identifies automatically favours BT as the incumbent operator, which does seem to be the natural consequence, intended or otherwise,  of BDUK’s behaviour.

Beyond the BDUK model itself, Chris points to two further show stoppers:

1 – Lack of public sector revenue guarantees to help derisk private sector investment

NYNet Ltd  in North Yorkshire is a prime example of the unintended consequences of removing from the market aggregated Public Sector demand. More...

Time passes swiftly and it is well over a year since Rory Stewart MP’s Rural Broadband Conference at Rheged and all the excitement that event engendered.

Despite Big Government in the form of BDUK specifically and generally understandable community uncertainty surrounding state aid, real progress has been made behind the scenes that reflects the significant and long term private investment in the community interest made by the NextGenUs Group into NextGenUs Cumbria CIC.

The First Mile Access Network is deployed and active;

The Dark Fibre path through Lancashire and Cumbria is complete and ready to light up at Gigabit speeds;

Combined together, these Fi:Wi elements will shortly be delivering SSB (Symmetrical Superfast Broadband), FROM 10Mbps through “BT Infinity=40Mbps” and beyond to the Gigabit realm in due course, dictated by public, private and community demand. More...

Reminiscent of the soap business, where a simple basic molecule (sodium laureth sulphate) is branded and badged multiple times to create the illusion of choice, thus in the wacky world of telecoms, BT provide the same basic Copper To The Home product that ISPs resell, further diluted down to sustain different price points.

These copper-based broadband services all suffer from the same basic deficiency, namely diminishing data rates over distance which is why rural (and a surprising number of urbanites too, though this is more often a function of decrepit line plant than distance per se) residents and businesses find their so-called broadband is unfit for purpose. More...

Another excellent blog post from Tref Davies triggered the following musings on what is really holding the UK back from delivering Jeremy Hunt’s aspiration.

In one word – LEGACY

The GPO was too good by half in the last century at deploying a truly world class copper infrastructure and that legacy, full amortised for the last quarter century, now represents the biggest barrier – all 20 Million KMs of it – for BT to deliver the future-proof, fit for purpose and above all socially inclusive 4th utility that the nation needs.

Not I hasten to add that this is the wish of the fantastic engineers at BT Openreach who privately are tearing their hair out at management ineptitude, rather the bean counters at BT who actually run the show and see copper as an asset to sweat. More...

Another community steps up to embrace the NextGenUs community interest approach to future-proof symmetric superfast broadband (SSB).

On an extraordinary Wednesday evening, thanks to sterling efforts by local broadband pioneers and the Parish Council, an unprecedented number (estimated at 135 local residents plus West Lindsey District and Lincolnshire County Councils representatives) turned out in force  at the local school for the NextGenUs Roadshow to see, hear and ask questions.

Already since a significant number of residents have stepped up and expressed their firm interest in securing for Scothern the same quality outcome as Ashby residents and businesses have enjoyed for the last year. More...

The youngest NextGenUs Broadband Pioneer is 12 years old and perfectly represents the Google Generation, those born since Google came into being.

In reality, the Google Generation is “Club Zero to 25″ as it begins not at birth rather at first exposure to the internet, so those who were say 10-12 years old in 1998 or since are all part of a demographic that treats using Search Engines as second nature.

The same argument can be applied to folks of any age, if their understanding of how to use the internet as an information gathering tool has developed since 1998 too.

A most interesting characteristic of the Google Generation is their ability to find needles of knowledge in the Digital Haystack (though finding hay still proves more challenging than expected!)

A fascinating, immensely empowering and unintended consequence of the Google Revolution. More...