Would you pay another £3 a month for fast fibre?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Futures, Networking, Internet on
BT shareholders should stop worrying about the cost of fibre. Everyone wants fast broadband and the current plans aren’t so expensive that they’ll take years to pay off.
I noticed the other day that the market didn’t take well to the news that BT is really moving forward on plans to roll out fibre across to the UK to drag broadband speeds into the 21st century (think 8Mbps DSL is fast? - check out Korea, or Paris where they’re laying 30Mbps fibre). Cable coverage in the UK is a joke (NTL bought the cheapest demographic data it could find for high population density and ended up cabling multiple occupancy council estates where it couldn’t get licenses to offer a service and running out of money before it got round all the consumers and small businesses that actually wanted cable modems).
Now the analysts at Point Topic have done some interesting sums. BT’s proposal to cover 40% of the homes in the UK for £1.5bn works out at £150 per household - a lot less than the £800 each in previous calculations for doing all 25 million households. And making that pay dividends to all those worried shareholders will only take about £3 per household, according to Point Topic, because BT will be making savings on operating costs. Fibre means new services to sell; we might finally be able to get seamless roaming between landline calls, mobile calls and VOIP - it’s all IP underneath, after all. Some of the bandwidth will doubtless get eaten up by pay-for IP TV services.
And the regulator will need to keep an eye on who you can buy fibre from or we’ll be back to a monopoly faster than you can tell Sid pirated content isn’t the only reason anyone wants a fast connection (when did you last use an MSDN CD instead of downloading the ISO?). The industry has been asking OFCOM to promise it will be able to make money out of fibre as if it was something new and different. There may more trenches to dig in remote areas - although you can blow fibre down an existing conduit with compressed air - and you have to get the termination right, but it’s not rocket science. As Tim Johnson at Point Topic puts it, “by and large BT’s shareholders should be able to finance the investment, carry the risk and reap a good profit in return.”
Bandwidth; it’s a business, not a right, but it should be good business all round.
-Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Matt - August 1, 2008 on 2:02 pm
Virginmedia make a point of how their broadband is by fibre, but the truth is that Viginmedia is HFC (Hybrid fibre / Co-ax), while I would guess that significant parts of BT’s backbone are also fibre.
Fibre to the home would be a major step forward, and you can almost see a time when IP protocol telephony will be the norm, and the remainder of the “plain old telephone service” will be implemented using Voip router boxes.
Make a comment
Tag cloud
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
Most commented posts
- Java’s SSVAGENT.EXE: training the monkey
5 comments
- Wubi Tuesday
- Not very open, not very social
- The best mobile game ever
- A Big Day In The Enterprise IT World
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger)
- Biometrics - it's not the technology that's broken
- More battery life, fewer explosions
- Spam Fighting in Exchange
- IDF: Will SSD mean the end of 5GB free?
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- Nobody knows what Web 2.0 really is (100%)
- Songs of distant satellites (100%)
- Log in and lock in (100%)
- Mommy, why is there a home server in the office? (100%)
- Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger) (100%)
- Locking down IT or blocking creativity (100%)
- Video opera? What would you do with huge bandwidth and millions of pixels? (100%)
- Consumer BlackBerrys are good for business (100%)
- HD Trek (100%)
- Top tips for speeding up Vista (100%)