The on-going cross party Culture, Media and Sport Committee inquiry into UK digital infrastructure produced another interesting evidence session yesterday after BT and sibling Openreach were both grilled over the country’s broadband quality, 1,000 missed appointments per week and USO plans etc.
Much of the debate was familiar fare, although the session did produce a few interesting bits of information. For example, BTOpenreach’s director, Kim Mears, admitted that their “biggest failing” was missing 1,000 appointments every week (here): “When we get it [installs etc.] wrong, we repeat the problem by missing appointments. We repeat the problem due to systems, process, ways of working – it could be a multitude of issues,” said Mears.
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Mears was flanked by BT Group’s CEO, , who chimed in to add, “We’ve got to be faster in repairing service. BT Consumer, Sky or TalkTalk have to work together because the problem could be in the home, in their systems, or down to us … we will focus more on service going forward.”
However ISPs sometimes complain that they are often forced to foot the bill for Openreach to find and repair faults in its own network (e.g. disputes over SFI charges). Similarly if a problem on OR’s network causes an ISP’s customers to be angry and leave or complain (e.g. loss of service due to OR fault) then the ISP takes the hit or possible ADR complaint handler fees, while Openreach as the supplier avoids this.
Similarly Ofcom’s Broadband Speed Code of Practice and the ASA’s linked advertising rules also only hit the ISP, not Openreach and the latter may sometimes be to blame for related performance woes. In other cases you can end up with a lot of oddball mistakes, such as how BT recently insisted that AAISP book an SFI engineer to test for a copper line fault, even though the faulty service was a pure fibre option FTTP line (here). Certainly some room for improvement.
Elsewhere BT suggested that the proposed 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) could be delivered by a mix of existing “fibre broadband” (FTTC / VDSL, G.Fast and FTTP) solutions to reach 99% of the UK for just under £2 billion (alternative methods would be required for the final 1%). But this still needs more explanation as it’s unclear whether they’ve included the existing BDUK “superfast” (24Mbps+) coverage expectation of 95-96% by 2017/18.
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The alternative for BT would involve a much cheaper approach, possibly by using an extended range enhancement of VDSL (FTTC) broadband (details), fixed wireless networks (e.g. 4G) and or ADSL2+ from the street cabinet (here) etc. But the details remain unclear and are subject to the outcome of future consultation and debate. BT talked a bit more about all this last year (here).
Meanwhile the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project, which last year saw plans for a contract extension with BT collapse due to disagreements over coverage and time-scale (here), also submitted some new written evidence to the DCMS inquiry and used the opportunity to criticise BTOpenreach’s lack of transparency over coverage mapping and confusion in its local FTTP roll-out.
CDS Statement – Mapping
Since the start of the contract, BT have been reluctant for us, as a partnership, to provide information to communities about when they can expect to see superfast or improved broadband. The position they have taken is that communities should only be informed after structures have gone live.
In July 2014, The Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport wrote to all local bodies, instructing them to publish rollout maps. Following this, Connecting Devon and Somerset published its own map and postcode checker in order to better inform communities of the intended rollout. The map was driven by data designated as CSI [Confidential Sensitive Information] in the contract and at the time this was published at our own risk.
We also do not have agreement to show Superfast areas on our deployment map, only fibre delivery or NGA coverage. This means that homes able to connect to a fibre enabled cabinet are shown as receiving services – ‘green’ regardless of whether they do receive any form of speed improvement or superfast capability. Needless to say this causes confusion and anger to many residents. We are in the process of reviewing how to improve this information on our map, but any revised mapping that shows superfast rather than fibre connectivity would be at our own risk given that this information is also regarded as CSI by BT.
CDS Statement – FTTP Deployment
Openreach have encountered a number of engineering problems when deploying Fibre to the Premise (FttP) in rural areas, leading to cost overruns in some cases. As a result of this CDS and BT agreed to put the FttP programme on hold pending a review to examine the common issues encountered by Openreach and where possible to discuss alternative, more cost effective solutions. This is still ongoing.
Unfortunately the build of FttP is quite visible in many rural areas and this has caused uncertainty and frustration amongst those communities who can see fibre coming towards them but have no information on completion dates. In some cases Openreach engineers have spoken to individuals and told them they would be getting FttP services.
BT’s unwillingness, however, to let communities know which technology they are expecting has made it impossible to be open and transparent with those who could be in scope for FttP. Whilst we have provided open information in response to MP letters and FoI, this has been at risk of BT claiming that we are in breach of our contract with them.
The mapping problem is a long running one that dates back to the early Phase 1 Broadband Delivery UK contracts and still has not been entirely resolved (this caused a lot of altnet schemes to stall because they couldn’t be sure where Openreach’s network would deploy or not), although it should be said that some local authorities are notably better than others at both communicating their deployment plans and through the delivery of superior maps.
On top of that not even Openreach can be 100% sure of the final deployment areas until their engineers actually get on the ground and start work, which is where costly problems with blocked ducts or other issues may finally become apparent (this could change the roll-out plan). On the flip side they are sometimes able to cover more areas than expected.
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As for the FTTP challenge, it’s well known that BT scaled back their original commercial deployment plans in order to save money and focus on expanding the reach of cheaper / slower speed FTTC services that were faster to roll-out and install into homes. However it’s interesting to see it confirmed that some of the same cost issues have also impacted BDUK contracts like CDS.
The inquiry is expected to publish its outcome within the next few months.
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