BTOpenreach, which manages access to BT's local UK telecoms infrastructure, has today announced the commercial launch of its often controversial Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product. PIA gives rival ISPs the ability to access BT's underground cable ducts and telegraph poles for the deployment of their own ultrafast fibre optic ( FTTP ) broadband networks.

BT claims to have gained the "confidence to proceed with the commercial launch" of its new PIA products, which will officially go live before the end of November 2011, after receiving "positive feedback" on its recent changes and price reductions (here) from triallist. In particular BT claims to have "made strong progress" with its largest and most significant trial customer - Fujitsu UK.

Earlier this year Fujitsu, with support from Virgin Media , TalkTalk and Cisco, announced that it would use PIA to deploy a new Open Access Wholesale Network (here). The network would aim to reach 5 Million homes in rural areas by 2016 and act as an alternative to BT's national platform. At the time Fujitsu warned that BT's PIA solution was still too expensive and demanded that the service be offered on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms.

Since then BT, under some additional government pressure, has revised its offering. Fujitsu is now said to be the "furthest-advanced participant in Openreach’s [PIA] trial" and last week connected its first end-users via their ultrafast 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises ( FTTP ) based network in the Wirral.



The move represents a significant and promising step forward, although Virgin Media recently cautioned ISPreview.co.uk that "there remains significant disparity between what BT is proposing and what industry knows the costs to carry out the work are". Virgin also noted that some of BT's PIA prices had remained unchanged or actually increased. Crucially many of the related areas were not covered in Ovum's recent study, which is what BT uses for some of its EU price comparison.

Fujitsu's solution also suffers from a heavy dependence upon public funds, which is needed to help get its network started. Some earlier reports suggested that the project could need as much as £500m from the government's Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office in order to achieve its targets. It's difficult to see this happening, especially with BT competing for the same pot of cash, and if Fujitsu's project does proceed then a scaling back of their ambitions and or re-adjustment of the funding requirements might become necessary.

UPDATE 22nd November 2011

BT's Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) officially became available as a true commercial product yesterday (21st November). Further details can be found here:

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/ductandpolesharing/ductandpolesharing/ductandpolesharing.do