Friday, 24 July 2009

BT FTTC: Is that it?

An apology first of all: late last night I sent out a tweet on this story from thinkbroadband http://bit.ly/13rzkA . I said it was a disappointing result and received a response from @thinkbroadband saying "I don't think FTTC installs are disappointing - It would be nice to have more of a push for FTTH of course as well.."

That's right. FTTC is to be applauded for while it is not FTTH (and I'll never get it) it is an improvement. So, lesson learned: if you cannot say what you want in 140 characters then best not to say it.

But... my disappointment stemmed from the speeds that are mentioned. I am sure the 40M download will grab the attention but the 1.7M upload is poor. Yes it should get better in the future but isn't it likely to get worse first? Remember this is the first customer to be connected to that cabinet, so no one else is contending for the upstream bandwidth. What happens when 100 customers are all online at the same time (both upstream and downstream)?

You may counter by telling me this is an 'engineering install' and therefore not indicative of the final product. Again, agreed but if so don't promote it until it has passed the initial trials and the headline speeds are closer to what we might expect.

Posted via email from Mark's posterous

1 comment:

  1. This comment received through Posterous:
    BT will get a basic FTTC going, and then release more and charge more. Is that it? Yes, it's just more of what you've got and you pay more.

    And given no planning rules are published, the backhaul issue will remain, 30Kbps per second peak period allocation per user. As importantly the underlying loss and delay characteristics will not change.

    UK Data connectivity will remain bound by BT's need to preserve private cirucits and voice services.

    Focusing on speed only is and will continue to give a sub-optimal answer.

    This is not something 'competition' will fix but needs a body demanding specifics from our connectivity.

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