Posted: 03rd Nov, 2010 By: MarkJ

BT Wholesale has announced the official pricing for its controversial
Broadband Enabling Technology (BET), which is often dubbed by the operator as a fixed line solution to rural broadband woes in the UK. That's despite many third party UK ISPs criticising its high cost and slow maximum speed of 2Mbps (requires two telephone lines) earlier in the year (
April 2010 News).
Existing broadband ADSL and ADSL2+ based services get slower the further they are from a telephone exchange, with homes of
5-6.5km away suffering very poor performance. By comparison BET (
SHDSL) claims it can deliver speeds of up to 1Mbps at
distances approaching 12km, which rises to 2Mbps when two telephone lines are "
bonded" together.
In theory this sounds like the perfect solution for meeting the governments
Universal Service Commitment (USC), which aims to make a broadband download speed of at least
2Mbps available to everybody in the country by 2015. However ISPs have historically shown no interest in BET, which is in no small part due to the fact that it costs almost as much to deploy as some "
super-fast" fibre optic solutions.
Trefor Davies, Chief Technology Officer at UK ISP Timico, said earlier this year:
"It is seen as too expensive, to the point where it is not dissimilar in price, if you need 15 users in an exchange to sign up [BT's estimated minimum requirement figure], to the installation cost of running fibre into the area."
Sadly anybody hoping that the final
IPstream Connect based pricing for BET would improve its attractiveness will be deeply disappointed. The connection itself will set you back a whopping
£1,094.00 and an upgrade to 2Mbps requires a further charge of
£549.00. Remember this is just the basic line charges, without all those ISP extras (profit, services etc.) and taxes bolted on top.
BT states that where BET is ordered as an upgrade to an existing IPstream Connect ADSL line the standard connection charges will not be raised in addition to the BET connection charge. It's further noted that the BET pricing covers both line speeds and also, for the majority of lines, any excess construction charges up to a limit of £5,000 per line.
However without some kind of significant government subsidy we simply cannot see many ISPs wanting to get involved. That ISP support will be crucial if BET is to establish itself and offer competitive service options.
BET's Original September 2009 Pilot Locations
Twyford - BERKSHIRE - South east england
Badsey - WORCESTERSHIRE - West midlands
LLANFYLLIN - POWYS - Wales
Leyland - LANCASHIRE - North west england
PONTELAND - NORTHUMBERLAND - North east england
WIGTON - CUMBRIA - North west england
Horsham - WEST SUSSEX - SOUTH EAST ENGLAN DuthSouthand
Wymondham - NORFOLK - East of england
*Inverness Culloden - scotland
*Dingwall- scotland
BET itself is technically nothing new and remains fundamentally identical to
Single-pair High-speed Digital Subscriber Line (SHDSL) technology, which has been around for awhile. Once installed the standard IPstream Connect end user access rentals apply and all of the ADSL IPstream Connect product variants are supported. As a solution it's far too expensive, although you do at least get a proper low latency fixed line service.