The BT Openreach division, which is responsible for ensuring that all rival Communication Providers (CP) have equality of access to BT's local UK network, has given ISPs the power to nominate several telephone exchanges (maximum of 6) for upgrade to its latest "super-fast" fibre optic broadband service.

The trial, which is only applicable to ISPs that already buy BT's Generic Ethernet Access (GEA) product, will run from September - December 2010. However in return for this ability the associated ISPs will need to give a firm commercial commitment, thus preventing them from selecting exchanges with only a small number of customers.

ISP Requirements for Exchange Nomination

* If an exchange is deemed to be viable for commercial deployment, the CP must guarantee that 10% of premises will be using its fibre broadband within a year. If this doesn’t happen, the CP will be liable for any costs incurred by Openreach in amending its deployment plan.

* If an exchange is deemed to be in an area that isn’t viable for commercial deployment the CP will be asked to fund any additional deployment charges faced by Openreach. These charges will vary from exchange to exchange and will only be provided following a detailed survey that will cost the CP £5,000 per exchange.

Ouch. Nominated exchanges would then be included in the 7th Phase of Openreach’s roll out plan, which is due to be revealed in early 2011 with exchanges being upgraded for fibre in late-2011/early-2012.

However, before everybody starts jumping for joy (unlikely, given the tight restrictions), BT has put a limit of 24 exchanges that can be included in its next roll out phase (i.e. a maximum of 4 participating ISPs). But, if the trial is successful, this figure could be increased for future phases of the deployment.


As it stands BT is investing £2.5bn in its roll out of up to 40Mb fibre optic based FTTC broadband services and 100Mbps FTTP. The service aims to reach 40% of UK premises in 2012 and 66% (16.5 million premises) during 2015. At present only the first five phases (covering approximately 6 million premises) of this deployment have been revealed, although exchanges for the 6th Phase could be announced before the end of this month!

In related news, Sean Williams, BT Retail's MD of strategy, portfolio, legal and regulatory services, has said that its super-fast fibre optic based broadband solutions could only extend beyond 66% by selling more value-added services over fibre, such as IPTV (ED: I think he means Project Canvas :tongue:). They'd probably love a bit of public money too.