BT Openreach Cuts Fibre-on-Demand FTTP Price for “Slow Speed Areas”

In an interesting move Openreach (BT) has decided to slash the distance based cost of their troubled Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) based Fibre-on-Demand (FoD / FTTPoD) product, albeit only for “slow speed areas” where their FTTC (VDSL2) technology fails to deliver above 10Mbps.

On paper FoD sounds like a good idea, but problems with complicated installations and high costs have hampered its appeal (here and here). At present most people are covered by Openreach’s up to 40-80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology and sadly only a few can access their native “ultrafast” 330Mbps FTTP network (around 330,000 UK premises).

The method behind FoD was essentially to give businesses (or rich home owners), specifically those already covered by FTTC, the ability to have their own FTTP service installed, albeit with the end-user being expected to stomach much of the installation / civil engineering cost involved (this is not the same as native FTTP where you only pay a small setup fee). Obviously this isn’t cheap.

At present FoD attracts a fixed connection charge of £750 +vat and an annual rental of £1,188 (£99 per month) from Openreach (here) and that’s before the ISP adds their own service charges and tax on top. Customers also need to pay a Distance Based Charge for installing the cable, which varies depending upon how far you live from the nearest distribution point (node).

According to Openreach, some 96% of premises are expected to be within 2km of the nearest NGA Aggregation Node. For example, Band A covers 0-199 metres and adds a cost of £200 +vat to the setup price, while Band B covers 200-399 metres (adds a cost of £600) and so forth until you end up potentially spending several thousand pounds.

The good news is that Openreach are about to launch a special offer on FoD for “slow speed areas“, which slashes the cost of their Distance Based Charge and will run between 1st Nov 2016 and 31st Jan 2017. For example, Band A is now £88 and Band B £263 (prices table), which is quite a significant drop.

Openreach Statement

There is a maximum of 10 orders across all participating CPs within the three month period

In order to be eligible for the Special Offer, the following criteria will apply:

* The CP must already be a signatory of the GEA contract and able to place orders via EMP

* The CP has successfully registered with Openreach to take part in the offer through their Openreach sales and relationship manager. Openreach will confirm that the CP is successfully registered to the offer.

* Distances for the FTTP on Demand order must be for bands A to H only. Details of the bands and special offer charges can be found at the URL shown below

* The post code for which the order is placed is subject to a slow speed GEA-FTTC of 10Mbps or less, as shown by the Openreach line checker

* At the time of ordering, the CP indicates “Apply FOD discount offer for slow speed area” in the notes of the order

* The maximum number of 10 orders has not been reached

Participating CPs will be informed on a weekly basis of the number of orders remaining within the Special Offer and will also be informed when the maximum number of orders has been reached. The Special Offer will terminate after the 10th order has been placed by a participating CP, or 31 January 2017, whichever is the earlier.

Orders will be processed weekly, and participating CPs can raise a maximum of 2 orders per week.

Sadly the offer is only open to a “maximum” of five ISPs, but that’s hardly a problem because most providers prefer to take the service via BTWholesale and in any case you’d be hard pressed to find even one that actually promotes it.

We can at least point to Spectrum Internet as one confirmed option. The FoD package offered by Spectrum promises an unlimited 330Mbps (30Mbps upload) service on a 36 month contract for £179 +vat per month, which is coupled to a one-off connection fee from £1,599.

We have asked Openreach for a bit more information and will report back when they respond.