Openreach has published “indicative prices” for the fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network rollout at Highams Park in north-East London, in a proposal that looks set to test not only the technology, but how much consumers are prepared to pay for superfast connections.
The price range of Openreach’s GEA-FTTP (Generic Ethernet Access fibre-to-the-premises) product is likely to be set between £175 and £255 per annum — or £14.58 to £21.25 per month — “for bandwidth options up to and including the 100/10 Mbps product with standard grade service repair response times”.
This is the price Openreach will charge communications providers, not the consumer, so expect ISPs to add their costs and profit margin on top, and then VAT of course. For comparison, a fully unbundled copper line costs an ISP about half as much — £86.40 per annum or £7.20 per month.
Although BT has already installed FTTP at the new commuter town of Ebbsfleet in the South East, Highams Park is unique in the UK because it is the first location for a trial of FTTP on a brownfield site.
The London-based telephone exchange, which serves around 21,000 homes, had previously been included in the list of locations for fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) deployment in the ‘Phase 2’ list for roll-out, but it’s upgrade has been accelerated.
BT also plans to pilot brownfield FTTP on a second, as-yet unspecified location, to bring the total number of FTTP home passed to 40,000.
Openreach switched focus from greenfield to brownfield, because the Ebbsfleet build got slowed down by the recession, and the company needed a high-volume site where it could really put FTTP through its paces, George Williamson, director, strategic network design at Openreach, told Total Telecom.
The Highams Park area was selected because it meets specific criteria — the two key requirements being “the availability of duct capacity to take fibre without the need for significant extra civil engineering work”, and “confirmed affordable levels of civil engineering work”.
Openreach’s timetable calls for the technical trial to start at the end of November, when the company will plan and build the network and see how long it takes to turn up services and fix faults.
The customer trial is scheduled for March to May 2010, after which a “go” or “no go” decision will be made on whether to proceed to a pilot phase. If all goes according to plan, then the GEA-FTTP brownfield sites will move to product launch in September 2010.
The FTTP network will be deployed as a “premium data overlay to the existing copper network”; in other words the fibre will carry broadband services only, with voice still being delivered over the copper telephone network.
Customers will get a transitional discount to offset the cost of running both copper and fibre networks. Once BT’s voice-over-NGA (VoNGA) product, a variant of VoIP that would provided guaranteed quality for voice calls over a fibre access network, becomes available, end-users will have to switch their voice service to fibre as well, or lose the discount.
Great article, fantastic to know next gen is starting to roll out, even if its in the easy places,at least it starts and once it gets rolling everyone will see the difference and what is possible. They will see the future. I wonder if the people there know just how lucky they are to be trialing this service? What exactly does it mean on page 5 (your link above) where it says it is 20meg down and 10 meg up prioritised? does that mean they only get the 100 meg when nobody else is using the pipe? Even so, it is a vast improvement on what is available elsewhere.