Openreach Start Removing LR-VDSL Broadband from UK Trial Areas

Openreach (BT) has confirmed that they will imminently begin withdrawing their Long Reach VDSL (LR-VDSL) broadband technology trial from several deployments across the UK, which at one point had been touted as way of helping to deliver on the government’s 10Mbps broadband USO.

The Proof of Concept (PoC) LR-VDSL trial was essentially a modified version of the same VDSL2 technology that already exists in the current ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) network, albeit harnessing higher signal power, vectoring, G.INP and wider frequency ranges (tech details) in order to deliver faster speeds over longer copper lines from your local street cabinet.

At one point it was even indicated that Openreach could have used LR-VDSL to support the government’s proposed 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) by pushing hybrid “fibre based” broadband out to 99% of the UK by 2020 or 2022 (here and here). The PoC itself took place in Isfield (East Sussex), North Tolsta and Barvas (Isle of Lewis) but there were some tentative plans to expand it.

Unfortunately an update posted by BT to ISPs last October 2017 noted that the technology “hasn’t proved as much as expected, especially for the sub 10Mb lines” (here). On top of that LR-VDSL worked best when older ADSL connections were first disabled, which could have complicated the roll-out because ISPs needed to be convinced to play ball (a particularly thorny issue for unbundled ISPs, not to mention some differences in pricing).

Shortly after this we learnt via another BT update that Openreach had “decided to no longer consider using Long Reach VDSL to deliver any Universal Service Obligation for Broadband” and that work was being undertaken to decide how best to tackle existing End Users (i.e. those who have already been moved onto LR-VDSL as part of the trial).

Suffice to say, we were unsurprised when some of Isfield’s residents recently began informing us that BT had begun notifying them of their intention to start “removing” the service and nudged the operator for a comment.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Since May 2016, we’ve been running a Proof of Concept (PoC) of Long Reach VDSL (LR-VDSL) in three locations: North Tolsta and Barvas in the Outer Hebrides and Isfield in East Sussex.

At the time, we saw significant increases in Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) broadband speeds and considered LR-VDSL as a potential solution in helping the UK government to deliver its universal service obligation (USO) for nationwide broadband with a minimum speed of 10Mbps.

After consultation with many of our Communication Provider (CP) customers, LR-VDSL is no longer seen as a preferred technology to deliver the USO and we are intending to end the PoC.

We notified affected CPs in mid-January and lines will revert back to standard FTTC in mid-April 2018.”

The government recently detailed their final design for the proposed 10Mbps USO (here), although crucially we’re still awaiting information from Ofcom on the key aspects of supplier choice, technology split and any solid details of the industry funding arrangement.

Obviously the loss of LR-VDSL could mean that a tiny number of end-users suffer a loss of performance, although by the sounds of it their local cabinet should remain enabled for standard FTTC (VDSL2). Previously some of the areas only had access to ADSL.