BT today announced a £1.5 bn investment in fibre deployment in the UK. This is an important first step in the widespread deployment of fibre networks across the UK, although one has to say that the announcement raises more questions than it answers.
At just 10% of the estimated figure for a national roll-out, BT is clearly hoping and expecting that Regional Development Agencies and/or local authorities across the country are going to offer to partner with them - and put cash on the table - to deliver fibre, especially into rural areas.
Also the game plan seems to be to cover just 40% of the population, leaving the remainder to the planned ADSL2+ cooper-based offering, providing "up to" 24 Mbps. At the same time Virgin Media will be rolling out its faster offering using DOCSIS 3 channel bonding technology, and the mobile networks seem to be promising better speeds also.
In general things are starting to move, and perhaps the best thing in this announcement from BT is the planned time-frame: 40% coverage by 2012, which gives a clear-ish time-frame for the rest of us to work to.
With the bulk of brownfield sites in BT's plan using FTTC (fibre to the street cabinet), and offering 40 Mbps at best, with a promise of a future improvement to 60 Mbps, with alucky few to get true FTTH offering 100 Mbps out of the box, with the scope to take that up to 1 Gbps and more (I think the current best performance in the lab is around 100 Gbps), it appears that BT have erred on the side of caution, keeping costs down in favour of incremental change.
This of course precisely what one might expect from the incumbent, and utterly predictable (turkeys don't vote for Christmas). However it does act as a spur for the debate, and we can hope that discussions will now be taking place up and down the country where politicians and community leaders will be looking and learning about the potential that fibre can deliver to their communities. Let us hope that they have the courage to look beyond BT's diluted offering, to the real added value that they get for their investment via the community owned open network model that we at Colne Valley Fibre have embraced.