BT Start Early Market Launch of Fibre Voice Access on UK FTTP Broadband Lines

BTOpenreach has announced that its Fibre Voice Access (FVA / FVA-FTTP) product, which allows ISPs to offer voice (telephone) services over fully fibre optic broadband lines (e.g. BT’s 100Mbps+ Fibre-to-the-Premises [ FTTP ] service), has now become available as part of their Early Market Deployment (EMD) launch.

The service will initially only be available to order at BT’s Bradwell Abbey, Highams Park telephone exchange, although it will gradually expand to reach other FTTP enabled exchanges in due course. At present FTTP coverage remains extremely limited.

It’s important to recognise that an early market launch, which is the last step before official commercial availability, will not include the same “guaranteed service levels” as BT’s final product.

BT will use any data from this EMD to refine their forthcoming commercial launch (some ISPs expect this to happen around the summer). Meanwhile any ISP wanting to offer a voice service alongside FTTP must contend with the controversial Transition Pricing (here).