Broadband

The BBC News website reports criticism by analyst Ian Fogg that BT Openreach’s forthcoming fibre trial at Ebbsfleet will be “too slow”. He opines that a trial should use the fastest technology available.

BT are of course trialling the product they plan to launch as opposed to running trials on the fibre technology itself. Their FTTH product will use GPON which is a Gigabit fibre technology using passive optical network (PON) components to split the laser beam to feed 32 properties from one fibre to the exchange. For example, a fibre speed of 1000 MBits/s divided by 32 is an average of 31 Mbits/s per property.

The Openreach trial invitation states: “Generic Ethernet Access with Base Data Port (BDP) ‘assured’ as a potential 10Mbit/s downstream and 2Mbit/s upstream bandwidth (or as otherwise agreed) over a single VLAN”

The key word here is “assured”. The service will be at least 10Mbits/s down and 2Mbits/s up. In addition to this base product are two variants that can burst to either 30 Mbits/s or 100 Mbits/s downstream. As with any shared access medium the actual burst speed will depend on system load at the time and what other users are doing.

The assured speed is the opposite of today’s “up to speeds” - instead of being “up to 8M on a good day if everything is okay and you are close to the exchange” it will be “10Mbps or better wherever you are”. It should be noted that contention can still be introduced at other parts of the network - e.g. with your ISP, or on the wider Internet. BT Wholesale are using Openreach’s GPON product in Ebbsfleet on top of their Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) product, but there’s nothing stopping other providers trialling the new fibre interface.

GPON is an asymmetric standard - 1.25 Gbps upstream and 2.5 Gbps downstream bandwidth total per fibre - and is designed to suit the typical telecoms provider thinking and structure. Some might argue that individual fibres to each home are better than shared access media like GPON, others may prefer different flavours of PON, however BT are using GPON and if others wish to provide different services there’s a whole market out there of new build and existing developments just waiting for them to offer a service. Unlike BT, an alternative provider would not have to worry about allowing third party access or wholesale services and could operate along the lines of Virgin Media Cable with a single vertically integrated product and infrastructure. This would lead to simpler lower cost solutions as well as the FTTH provider capturing all of the revenue and not just the wholesale access slice of it.

We suspect that most consumers would be delighted with an assured downstream rate of 10M and upstream rate of 2M and look forward to such services being delivered. Far better to get on and do something than debate whether what BT is doing is right or not.

Tags: BBC, BT Openreach, Ebbsfleet, FTTH, Virgin Media, WBC