By Jo Best, 14 July 2009 16:54
...BT charge whatever it likes for fibre after Ofcom said it won't impose any pricing controls on fibre access. According to the ever-optimistic Ofcom head Ed Richards, the cheap cost of copper and mobile broadband will keep BT and others from running rampant with fibre pricing.
Such a hands-off approach is essentially seen as a sop to BT and other operators who have long complained about the high cost of putting in a fibre infrastructure: by taking away the threat of price caps, operators should be theoretically more comfortable they'll be able to achieve a return on investment for their outlay.
Hmm, I seem to remember BT complaining about that a while back - saying they'd never be able to get a return on investment with fibre. Does that ring a bell with you?
Indeed it does - cast your mind back to the heady days of 2006, when one BT exec revealed the telco had abandoned trials of fibre to the home saying: "For widespread fibre deployments, I've yet to see a business case that pays for the deployment."
A year later and another exec told silicon.com the market wasn't ready to pay for fibre: "You have to be ready to pay for that investment. My shareholders are not a charity. It isn't a regulation issue, it's a market issue - if no one wants to pay for [high definition video] streams they're not going to magic themselves into people's homes."
Two years on, and BT is chucking £1.5bn at fibre. Was all the grumbling about return on investment meaning fibre would never take off a game of chicken between Ofcom and BT? What do you think?
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1. Richard Davies
I live in Scarborough and my broadband at home is currently down to 400 - 500Kbps and never gets above 1Mbps!
This is down to the awfull condition / quality of the lines from the green box to peoples houses and so if they spend all this money and only put the fibre as far as the green box then in my opinion they might as well have not bothered.
A residential connection won't benefit if the line into the premises is the same rubbish that caused problems previously.
In my opinion FTTP is the only option and the cost should be recouped over a number of years from both residents using it and BT reselling the fibre to other ISP's.