Fluidata ISP Boss Warns of Phantom UK “Fibre Broadband” Availability

The Managing Director of Fluidata, Piers Daniell, has highlighted one of the most frustrating and often overlooked problems with BTOpenreach’s roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) based “fibre broadband” services. When the service is technically available, but due to a capacity shortage you can’t get it.

Every one of Openreach’s street cabinets has a limit, most obviously in terms of how many active customer lines they can handle (e.g. a few hundred subscribers for the big cabs or less for the smaller units) before more cabinets / capacity needs to be built. Other problems may also exist, such as with the need for a better local power supply etc.

In any case it’s well known that cabinets, especially those in areas where the demand from local premises may quickly outstrip supply, can and do run out of capacity (example). The result is that Openreach and ISPs cannot connect extra customers until more capacity / cabinets are built and sadly this can sometimes take a very long time to resolve.

Piers Daniell said:

“One such issue was recently highlighted to me by a neighbour who said to me that he had finally got ‘fibre broadband’ as it had just been enabled in our building. “No”, I replied, it has been in our building since January 2014 when BT first enabled the local cabinet. What has transpired is that while our building has been enabled, the actual cabinet quickly ran out of capacity and it has taken over a year to deliver more capacity to it so that the rest of the residents could receive the service.

So is that due to BT being overstretched, or possibly a lack of hardware available? Or cynically could you read into this that actually on paper, at least, our building has been enabled and so therefore met a target, even if not many people can actually order it.

The same could be said where I live in the country. For the past nine months, I have been inspecting a shiny new cabinet that has appeared at the end of my drive. ‘Fibre Broadband is coming’ said a BT engineer to me who came to fix my broken phone line. Maybe, but at the moment all I can see is an empty box in preparation for it.

Are we going to get the same issue in our village, that only a few will be able to enjoy it until it reaches capacity when it is finally enabled? And has the very presence of the cabinet thwarted any plan from an alternative fibre provider from investing into connecting up our village?“

In fairness this is not an exact science and Openreach can only estimate the expected level of demand within any given area or period of time, while the need to deliver a return on their investment will always make an operator more inclined to be cautious with how much additional capacity they initially build-in.

On the flip side full FTTC cabinets are also technically good news as they show that strong demand does exist, particularly when it occurs in areas where doubts about local demand may have previously been expressed. Never the less we do see a fair few similar gripes about this. Both ISPs and Openreach could certainly do more to better communicate the reasons for such problems and clarify when they will be resolved.

Meanwhile it’s important not to confuse the above situation with another one that can occur during the early deployment stages for a new community. Some consumers may mistakenly believe that once they see a new cabinet pop-up then the service will be immediately available, although it can often take a fair bit longer (many months) before Openreach activates all of the relevant local connectivity in order to make the service “live“.