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On Thu, 7 Oct 2010, Julian Hall wrote:
'Ofcom has ordered BT to allow competitors control of its fibre cables in a move designed to promote the take-up of superfast broadband services.'http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11491528
Hm. It's not that clear exactly what it is though...Currently, BT's wholesale network is wide open to anyone who wants to buy into it and this includes FTTC connections. Several ISPs already use BT's system and I have one customer (as a reseller of Entanet) migrating to FTTC in the next week or 2... This is nothing new.
I think this is allowing others to either run their own fibres in BT's ducts, etc. and/or allow others to use BTs existing fibre in a wholesale manner - but you can already do that, it's called getting a leased line (or lan extension, etc). That's presumably what Rutland have done, they've bought a BT leased line, connected one end into a decent ISP, and the other terminates at their cabinet, next to BT's cabinet where they have their own router and mini-DSLAM in the cabinet and patch into BT's cabinet to get the "last mile" to the punters premises...
Having acces to the ducting suddently opens up a lot of possibilities - e.g. for Virgin to run their own fibre down to local cable boxes, etc.
There's also this from The register: Competitors will be able to offer broadband via fibre through a new arrangement known as Virtual Unbundled Local Access (VULA). Unlike under Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) - which stimulated competition in the copper broadband market - under VULA TalkTalk and others will not install their own equipment in exchanges, but take remote control of the configration of BT's equipment.So basically an ISP pretens to LLU an FTTP or FTTC line, gets direct control of their own circuits to noodle the settings, etc. but it's really still going over the BT wholesale network...
It's all a con, I tell you ... Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq