BT Wholesale UK Broadband Checker Adds SOGEA FTTC Availability

The launch of Openreach’s new Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SOGEA) product, which enables consumers to buy a standalone UK hybrid fibre broadband (FTTC / VDSL2 or G.fast) ISP line without the voice (phone) service, looks to be imminent as its availability status has recently been added to the BTWholesale checker service.

At present most consumers on Openreach’s national copper line and hybrid fibre network (excluding ultrafast FTTP “full fibre” lines) buy their phone service alongside line rental (included by default) and then broadband is optionally added on top, although many ISPs tend to bundle both together.

However most people only use their fixed line for broadband (i.e. mobiles and VoIP are preferred for calls) and the old analogue voice services are due to be withdrawn by 2025 (here). As such Openreach has spent the past few years developing the SOGEA solution for Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) lines (also known by the silly name of SoG.Fast for G.fast lines).

In short, this is designed to enable consumers to buy a standalone hybrid fibre broadband line without the voice / phone service, but don’t expect a big fall in price because the voice component of your line rental is only a tiny part of its cost (SOGEA wholesale pricing).

The service also introduces a new front plate for the latest NTE5C Master Socket, which where necessary has been designed to prevent analogue voice being reinjected back onto Openreach’s network from the end users premises (SOGEA technical details). All of this will help to support a future direction where voice calling is largely handled via VoIP.

The SOGEA service has been in its final ISP pilot phase since earlier this year (here) and its commercial launch is expected imminently (during May 2019 was the last update we saw), while SoG.Fast is trailing a little and should launch soon after. Full national coverage of SOGEA is expected to be achieved during the second half of 2019.

In keeping with all this we note that the ‘WBC SOGEA Availability Date‘ column on BT Wholesale’s broadband checker (thanks Peter) is now being populated with the “available” marker (previously this was just left blank). We understand that several ISPs, such as Sky Broadband, are looking at launching related packages but as yet we haven’t seen them (tricky to market these as there isn’t much of a cost advantage and some ISPs may wish to get an optional VoIP solution ready first).

On a separate point we’ve noted that today many of our usual test addresses have stopped returning the results for ‘Premise Environment‘ at the bottom of BT Wholesale’s checker (it’s not showing up for us today but this may be temporary). Admittedly the results for Bridge Tap, VRI and NTEfaceplate are probably fairly useless for the masses.