Openreach Offers to Carry Customer Kit for G.fast Broadband ISPs

Openreach (BT) has announced a new Proof of Concept (PoC) for their rollout of G.fast based “ultrafast broadband” (100Mbps+) services, which will see them offering to carry ISP Customer Premises Equipment (e.g. routers and modems) on their vehicles in order to help improve service delivery.

At present the 330Mbps capable hybrid fibre G.fast service is currently still waiting to fully enter the Early Market Deployment (EMD) phase (ISPs tell us it’s running a bit behind) and we expect it to cover 1.1 million UK homes and business by March 2018, before ramping up into a full commercial roll-out to reach 10 million premises by the end of 2020.

The new PoC will thus form part of Openreach’s G.fast based Next Working Day provision and Harmonised Repair appointments. The advantage of this approach is that ISPs could in theory get the installation and CPE hardware setup all on the same day, which probably won’t be too difficult initially because most early installs are likely to use Openreach’s own Huawei MT992 modem.

ISPs already have the option of providing their own approved CPE kit for G.fast and so instead of posting those out separately they could now simply ask Openreach to carry them along inside their vans. Take note, Openreach currently charges £99 +vat for Install with a communications providers router or £150 for a Managed install with their own Openreach modem (pictured above).

Sadly the public briefing doesn’t offer any further details, thus it’s unclear what restrictions or costs apply and whether the CPE kit that Openreach offers to carry could also include other hardware like TV set-top-boxes (doubtful). We have asked and are awaiting a reply.

However we do recall the idea being discussed by BT Wholesale in September and at the time we understood that it might only be offered to ISPs which could commit to doing 10,000 installs. Obviously this limits the service to larger providers but then that’s probably unavoidable as it would be tricky to do it for the smallest providers (i.e. easier to just post the kit to end-users).

As usual this PoC is just a test and it may or may not turn into a new product offering for ISPs and their subscribers. Meanwhile BT, TalkTalk and Plusnet are all taking part in the current G.fast trials, although we know that other ISPs (e.g. Cerberus Networks) are taking orders for G.fast and most of those expect to go live during the Jan-March 2018 window (this may be too optimistic).

We should caveat the above by saying that some ISPs are seeing a few delays with the G.fast work and so commercial product launches may be put back further into 2018.

The 46 G.fast Pilot Locations
Armley, West Yorkshire
Balham, South London
Bath Kingsmead, Somerset
Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire
Bolton, Greater Manchester
Brierley Hill, West Midlands
Brighton Hove, East Sussex
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire
Chorlton, Manchester
Derby, Derbyshire
Donaldson, Edinburgh
Eltham, South London
Gillingham, Kent
Glasgow Bridgeton
Glasgow Douglas
Glasgow Langside
Great Barr, West Midlands
Hammersmith, West London
Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
Hunslet, West Yorkshire
Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire
Kidbrooke, South London
Liverpool Central
Lofthouse Gate, West Yorkshire
Luton, Bedfordshire
Manchester East
Mansfield, Nottinghamshire
Newbury, Berkshire
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newmarket, Suffolk
North Birmingham
Parsons Green, West London
Portsmouth North End
Pudsey, West Yorkshire
Rochdale, Manchester
Rusholme, Manchester
Sheffield, South Yorkshire
South Clapham, South London
St. Austell, Cornwall
Swansea, Wales
Swindon, Wiltshire
Upton Park, East London
Wandsworth, South London and
Whitchurch, South Glamorgan

UPDATE 3:04pm

Credible sources inform us that the PoC is limited to covering 1,000 installs across all ISPs and it’s only for routers / modems (not TV set-top-box kit etc.). The test will run from 10th January 2018 until 30th March 2018 (or until 1,000 CPE jobs are completed) in 19 of the initial G.fast pilot areas.