Openreach Trial Progresses FTTP Broadband for Business Plans
Openreach (BT) has this week launched a new “Advanced Provision Trial” for their UK gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP products, which so far as we can tell appears to be the next step on the operator’s path toward development of a new FTTP for business product.
As we’ve reported before (here and here), Openreach have been slowly working toward the development of a new ‘FTTP For Business’ (aka – FTTP Advanced) product that could harness XGS-PON technology and may eventually even offer symmetric speeds (existing products are all asymmetric, with slower uploads due in part to the limits of their current GPON infrastructure). Such products would obviously cost more than their consumer-focused plans and attach a higher priority rate for data etc.
The latest development on this front appears to be the announcement of a new FTTP Advanced Provision Trial. Sadly, the public briefing doesn’t contain anything to help explain what this is, although we’ve today been able to uncover a few more details.
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By the sounds of it the Advanced Provision Trial will help Openreach to test some new and more complex installation scenarios on business and public sector sites, which will adopt some of the same things that you might normally expect to see from an Ethernet (EAD) install rather than FTTP.
For example, at present a regular FTTP installation comes with two options – Standard and Premium. One of the differences here is that a Standard install will see Openreach place the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) on your wall, usually within 10 metres from where the fibre enters your building (house etc.). A Premium installation extends this to 30m, but the new Advanced trial can do up to 100m (subject to survey).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Openreach ran fibre through my road a few weeks ago, when I enquired about it they said it was only available to businesses on the road (a few hotels). I don’t understand why it’s only available to businesses when they ran fibre through the whole road, isn’t it worthwhile to make it available to residential premises too.
It could have been fibre for leased lines. The leased line network is completely separate from FTTP, so doesn’t make it any easier to install FTTP.
You could order a leased line at home, but expect to pay upwards of £300 per month on a 3 year contract!
And it gets worse . .
https://www.ciz-openreach.co.uk/Business/content/173/Ethernet-Access-Direct-EAD-explained
Somebody tell me that I’ve got the wrong-end of the stick . . . Openreach are telling us that they are prepared to provide industry and commerce, presumably on demand, with EAD coax (An out-of-date technology) connection runs of 45 km. The cost . . . Would be massive . Another tax on final output. What’s the technical advantage over bundled fibre or, come to that bundled twisted oair ?
Somebody got a warehouse full of old stock they want to ditch ? In which case,
If this to takes off, BT will have to start ripping up the local telephone cables early to keep the copper oruce down.
Bearing in mind retail customers are increasingly being told that laying in fibre to rural locations is financially infeasible . . That’s an awful lot of neck to justify this. Of course, its taxpayer funded, but by a tax that the Inland Revenue won’t be seeing.
When will the “World beating” stuff end ? Any other countries doing this ?
You have the wrong end of the stick.
EAD is a fibre leased line. I’ve bought hundreds, if not thousands, of them from Openreach over the years. Why do you think it’s co-ax?
EAD is delivered over fibre, and always has been. Where did you get the impression that it involved coax??
At 5:43 in the video you’ll see the Adva NTE box for 10/100/1000. It has the fibre connection going into it on the right hand side. The local customer connection into this box is fibre for a 1G circuit, or copper for 10/100.
Unless its military grade shielding, signals down coax, is going to be subject to jnrerference from every little electrical sprite and phantom in the vicinty. Witness the customers if Beardy’s Cable Comoany, locally, . who inherited coax from the early 1990s bonanza installation, only to find, subsequently, HS2 laying a 33Kv cable (To supply one of the tunnels) through the same residential West London streets. Just wait fir the torrent if complaints once the TBM gets going.
Hi Nick, just a quick note to confirm your wrong.
Keep up the good work
cheers
G
EAD isn’t coax. Regardless, coax cable is used specifically in many applications because it has strong interference rejection. Why do you think cable TV networks were designed to use it? If the electrical noise in an environment was sufficient to disrupt a signal carried on coax, no service would be possible in that area, data or voice, on twisted pair cables.
Before fibre became widespread it was common to use coax to deliver high bandwidth circuits to power stations and factories precisely because of its ability to perform well in high noise environments.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your information from, but in summary;
– EAD is a fibre optic private line product.
– Coaxial cable is not particularly susceptible to electrical noise.
” a Standard install will see Openreach place the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) on your wall, usually within 10 metres from where the fibre enters your building”
I am a bit confused: What “wall” is this article talking about if not the house?
House, office etc.
The reason I thought it was coax dates back to the lines over which the original kilostream and megastream services in London ran. I thought they were co-ax and remained unused in situ after those original services were withdrawn. Consequently, I concluded that that network might possibly have the capability to form a re-useable core network in major towns, from which it was now being proposed that spurs would be run to commercial and industrial customers in smaller satelite towns at a potential cost lower than constructing same from scratch
Kilostream used standard twisted pairs and megastream used transverse screen cables (thick copper) or optic fibre, even in the 80s. Coax was only used into electrically noisy environments and for premises cabling between the network edge and the customer’s equipment.
I don’t understand how you could write such angry and misleading posts about something that you imagined.