Indicative WBC launch prices and new 21CN roll out information
BT Wholesale have announced indicative launch prices for their 21CN-based Wholesale Broadband Connect and IPStream Connect products to Consult21 members. These prices have changed considerably since the trial prices were released last Autumn.
End User Access pricing
As with the launch of ADSL Max, BT Wholesale will again be offering free migration from IPStream/DataStream to WBC, providing you stay with the same ISP. The normal migration charge of £11 will apply otherwise.
One thing we highlighted last year when we wrote extensively about 21CN was the massive wholesale price gap between urban and rural End User Access pricing (often referred to as “Band 1″ and “Band 2″ pricing). An End User Access (EUA) circuit is the tail circuit between your house and the exchange. Both EUA prices have now been lowered slightly, but a large gap still persists between the two. Pricing for the Elevated Service EUA has not yet been released.
Whilst the EUA price may have been reduced slightly, bandwidth costs (within contract terms) have risen by 32%. Pricing for uncontracted bandwidth and QoS services have not yet been announced.
| Product component | Trial price (Oct 2007) |
Launch price (indicative) |
Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Urban/Band 1 EUA per month | £6.28 | £6.03 | -3.98% |
| Rural/Band 2 EUA per month | £8.04 | £7.81 | -2.86% |
| Contracted bandwidth (per Mbit) | £67.90 | £89.45 | +31.74% |
Aggregation Point pricing
Whilst bandwidth pricing has seen a large price hike, Aggregation Point pricing has seen the biggest cuts. Originally, presence at a single AP (Aggregation Point) was to cost £48,000 per annum. With twenty 21CN APs nationwide, ISPs would have had to shell out £960,000 in total each year (and that’s before any bandwidth or EUA circuits are considered!). It appears BT have listened to pricing concerns from stakeholders though; they’ve now dropped individual AP rental to £27,778 per annum. Alternatively, ISPs are being offered a package of all twenty APs for £500,000 per annum - a saving of nearly 50% over the trial prices.
Presence at each AP is required if an ISP wants the full flexibility that WBC has to offer. These same APs can be used to serve IPStream Connect services (the 21CN variant of IPStream). Note that presence at APs are not required for ISPs opting to use the end-to-end managed service, WBMC.
Roll out information
BT are still keeping very quiet regarding specifics of their roll out schedule for 21CN. Indeed, even the Switched-On website is not informing users of PSTN switch-over dates any more.
There have been some hints around WBC roll out though, as this slide from the latest Consult21 meeting shows. At launch in April there will be 84 WBC enabled exchanges, 82 of which will be taken from the 1016 Band 1 exchanges. A year later 869 exchanges will be WBC enabled, covering some 55% of the population. Again, the vast majority of these (90%) will be Band 1 exchanges, suggesting that those in rural will likely not have 24Mbps WBC broadband available to them until mid-2009 at the earliest.
A quick play with some statistics reveals that 908 of the 1016 Band 1 exchanges already have ADSL2+ available to them via one or more of the LLU operators. With this in mind, it is easy see why some are suggesting that the launch of WBC will have little effect of the speeds available to people for quite some time yet.
A breakdown of BT’s banding of exchanges (taken from the ADSL Max roll out in 2006) can be found here, although whether or not this is still current is unclear.
A zip file containing the material that this article was derived from is available here.
Tags: BT Wholesale
