By Graeme Wearden, 22 August 2005 09:10
NEWS BT has stopped rolling out its business broadband service until at least early 2006, citing lack of demand caused by high prices.
A BT spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that it has stopped upgrading local exchanges to offer SDSL, which is more suitable for small businesses and branch offices than ADSL. "It is because of a lack of take-up," explained the spokeswoman. "The feedback from our service providers is that the reason is basically the cost of SDSL."
BT had itself set the target of offering SDSL from 800 local telephone exchanges, mostly in metropolitan and other urban areas. At present, it has upgraded 729 exchanges.
BT hopes its recent decision to cut wholesale SDSL prices by up to 30 per cent will kickstart the SDSL market. If so, these remaining exchanges could then be upgraded.
SDSL, or symmetric DSL, provides a two-way high-speed internet connection. This makes it more suitable for organisations that want to upload large amounts of data, perhaps because they host websites or run an email server used by remote workers.
BT has repeatedly sung SDSL's praises. Earlier this month, the telco said "symmetric broadband is ideal for business use as it supports applications that require the same upstream and downstream speeds. This allows businesses to benefit from applications such as video conferencing and realise greater efficiencies through fast file transfer".
Some rival telcos, such as Easynet, offer their own SDSL services in competition with BT. But many of those businesses who can't get BT's SDSL service may have to make do with ADSL instead.
The BT spokeswoman said: "There are other parts of our portfolio which should meet people's needs."
Back in 2003, before it officially launched SDSL, BT had admitted that many firms were happy with ADSL, which is now available to more than 99 per cent of homes and businesses.
Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Martin Morris
I rather suggest that BT's reluctance to roll out SDSL any further than at present is more likely to be connected to their engineer's inability to install the product than to any pricing issue.
I, as an independent IT Consultant, have specced, and ordered SDSL only twice, once in Cheshire, and once in London - neither installation was completed at the first attempt, with one resulting in a total out of the entire local exchange, and the other in me having my engineer sat around for 2 days waiting for BT to activate the SDSL line they 'had activated' a week previous.
2. anonymous
Businesses need SDSL at prices that are close to ADSL. Beyond 1MB, high data rates are themselves not as important as having similar upstream and downstream rates.
For the business user there's little point in BT rolling out ever higher downstream rates if upstream remains bogged down at 256K.
Rather than stopping their SDSL rollout, BT should accelerate it and reduce prices to be no more than ADSL + 30%
3. Simon
Poor old BT, can't win either way ! But the current situation is largely o ftheir own making by being so inflexible in their own offerings, and so 'unhelpful' to the whole business of allowing real technical competition.
At work I have a real need for SDSL, but only at one site. The only sites I can get it are where I don't need it ! Ac tually, I don't even need SDSL at the one site, what I actually need is more outbound bandwidth than inbound - technically possible but not available.
4. Ian Savell
Having put some of my customers on SDSL I wouldn't recommend any business with outgoing traffic such as email or VPN to choose ADSL. The extra cost isn't much compared to other business costs but the all-round improvement from losing the 256K upstream limit is astonishing.
Of course, poor takeup means SDSL customers get lower actual contention ratios than ADSL customers, so everyone please ignore my advice!
5. Dan Smith
...Or perhaps another reason for BT's reluctance is due to SDSL "canibalising" its more profitable leaseline business.
6. Lindsey
Or that it "interferes" with their one- way broadcast model as well as their business model.
Heaven forbid if little Johnny in his bedroom started hosting some serious content on serious servers over bonded SDSL connections. And you can't have everyone discovering that ADSL isn't broadband yet, (as many of us here know it isn't) cos then BT et al would be wasting their marketing budgets convincing Joe Public and the Govt we are on track to compete with the rest of the broadband world in a knowledge economy wouldn't they? Jeez, the paradigm might shift (at last) and upset the telcos.......
C'mon baby light my fibre, before we all get entrenched in the next round of promises from BT that 21CN is going to be 'it'. This is exactly what happened with ADSL, with the gullible masses and Govt being only too pleased to have ADSL after the nightmares of dial up without looking forward or outward.
DSLAMs these days can deliver ADSL and SDSL - so stop faffing around guys and give us symmetry so we can show and sell the rest of the world what we are doing at grassroots over symmetrical local networks.
7. Gregory Dumont
It's a real shame. We have 2 offices in UK and SDSL is business critical for us to link the 2 sites together with VPN. Only one site has SDSL and the other one (yet on a highly popular business park in Milton Keynes) is not eligible (and I understand it won't be for a while, or ever?)...