A monopoly of mediocrity

The announcement of FTTP trials in Bradford alongside 12,500 premises of G.fast in Gillingham had me thinking a little.

One thought was who in Gillingham was influential enough to persuade Openreach to invest some serious money there; it's fair to say that it wasn't in any way related to the benefits it might bring given the entire constituency is 92.2% ultrafast, 98.6% superfast, however I suspect the extensive Virgin Media coverage wouldn't have hurt.



Another, partly inspired by Virgin Media digging up pavements nearby, was to what extent Openreach invested in ultrafast technology and indeed the extent of their investment in urban areas generally during their initial rollout.

I've seen the numbers, however they are put into focus when trawling the Think Broadband data.

Leeds is the 3rd largest city in the UK. It has a population of over 3/4 of a million. It has the largest legal and financial centres in England outside of London. It's home to the Bank of England's office outside of London.

According to Think Broadband it has no native Openreach GEA FTTP. BT's contribution to ultrafast broadband in this entire metropolitan area is, as of right now, zero. Every single FTTP/H premises is Hyperoptic enabled apartments, every ultrafast premises is either them or Virgin Media.



This is something I've felt keenly as I've been looking into home office options to get around a wobbly superfast broadband service. The only business broadband option from BT Group potentially delivering both performance and reliability would cost over £15,000 over the mandatory 3 year contract term, and this wouldn't carry guaranteed performance or availability targets.

A leased line supplier informs that the install quote I received for FTTPoD, the shared fibre service from BT, is 'rather high' and they can install dedicated fibre to my property for 1/3rd that.

AQL can probably offer me a leased line, guaranteed performance and availability, for considerably less than what is basically a business broadband service from BT, which is absurd.

Alternatively I can rent office space. Also cheaper than the BT option.

We should, by now, have an urban core of FTTP/H in the major settlements with FTTC/VDSL on the outskirts, in some market towns and where appropriate rural areas. Instead there is far more FTTP/H per head in rural areas and the amount of it in urban areas, apartment blocks and a few areas built out to for political and other reasons excepted, is vanishingly small.

The UK has one hell of a long way to go and a hell of a lot of work to do moving broadband to the next level in the 'just in time' approach espoused by BT Group. The approach that has allowed Virgin Media to tread water and others to sit back and do nothing to one being upgraded to one that's fit for purpose going forward. Openreach deploying ultrafast in an urban area should not be newsworthy. It's depressing that what should be the status quo, 300Mb being available in a couple of urban areas and gigabit to very limited areas of another, hits the news.

Superfast is the new normal. Ultrafast is the new 'superfast'. Both should be available in our large cities to those who wish to pay.

The market as a whole has, with Ofcom's encouragement and indeed thanks largely to their obsessive over-regulation, become a monopoly of mediocrity.

Virgin Media are trolling me - home office broadband and moving

Walk out of my street and onto the road that serves ours to find this:

Virgin Media are going right past the entrance to our street on their way to properties across the road.

It'll be interesting to see what impact VM passing an area served by cabinet 82, albeit maybe 20-25% of the properties served by cabinet 82, has on the extremely high FTTC uptake here.

Predictably this work has caused complaints. This is, perhaps, something that Virgin Media are getting quite used to by now. Digging pavements is slow, expensive and, albeit briefly, disruptive.

I have been having some issues with my home office service's reliability and performance that make my desire for a backup that uses a different network all the stronger.

Less than half usual performance

A quote for FTTP on Demand not only gave a huge price but I was also told they weren't willing to progress the order due to my road's status.

For many reasons we've been considering a possible house move. Unavailability of alternative broadband options for my home office goes onto the list. It's nowhere near the top but has to go on there.

Over half of the UK has the choice of BT and another fixed line operator.

The vast majority have a choice of BT FTTC and either a >8Mb Openreach ADSL line, cable, wireless or 3G/4G. Sadly we aren't, and have no prospect of being, in that cohort.

FTTC is good enough for most purposes, is far cheaper and faster to deploy so made economic and business sense - I have no complaints about that solution being here. It'd be fine as a primary line for us if we had a backup solution however no cable, no worthwhile ADSL, no wireless and no 3G or 4G puts us almost back to the position we were in during the Fibre for Middleton campaign that saw BT deliver superfast broadband to us.

Maybe we should move to an FTTP-enabled rural village or hamlet; more FTTP serving houses in those than Leeds Central. In common with many other urban areas the fibre to premises in Leeds Central is all delivered to apartment buildings by Hyperoptic. FTTP is by far the most reliable broadband out there so if you can get it, do.

We're between rock and hard place, and while it seems as far as broadband goes the in thing is to complain relentlessly on forums and the comments section of ISP Review, the usual and more constructive solution is to get out from between that rock and hard place.

Update: I just had a local resident ask me when he could expect Virgin Media to cover his street. Had to tell him that if he was lucky it would be 2019. If unlucky never, and that it was extremely unlikely he would have better broadband options than the ones he has now, which are 1Mb if he's lucky or 40-60Mb depending on where in his street he is. 

This estate has a household income over 3 times that of the rest of the ward, and far more home businesses and home workers. Much of the estate will have broadband of at best 1/8th the performance of the rest of the ward and more likely 1/14th to 1/25th by 2019.

There's a digital divide.

Developer delays

So as may have been noted from an earlier post of mine rollout of ultrafast broadband in my area is difficult due to unadopted roads.

This area has had a long history of issues between developers and council, as I suspect most do. The FTTC cabinet that serves the area is only there because the council adopted the road early after a bunch of wrangling with the developers concerned.

I'm beginning to understand their pain. This is from the section 38 agreement governing the road adoption process in my immediate area. The maintenance period is the 12 months between being provided a provisional certificate and the final adoption inspection.

Now I'm not a lawyer but this seems pretty clear. During the maintenance period keep the road to be adopted in good order and fix anything that you find wrong.

The below email from a developer seems to indicate they disagree:

Again I'm not a lawyer and could be, and indeed probably am, wrong, but I'm not sure that ignoring the defects until the inspector has highlighted them and rejected the road due to them is keeping to the paragraph in the agreement above. I would have thought that the developer should be doing a little more than just noting the defects, fixing them would've seemed to be more compliant.

I have, of course, brought this to the attention of the local authority. Because I'm nice like that.

I'm not holding my breath for the developer remedying the issues any time soon, which is bizarre as you'd have thought they'd be desperate to rid themselves of responsibility for roads, not drag the process out.

Input on why they'd do this welcome. The cynic in me says that they are hoping the highway inspector won't see all the issues they are aware of and they can save money on repairs, instead having the taxpayer pick up the tab post-adoption. That is just me being cynical, right?

New build - new problems

This is a long story charting the woes of a new build estate and the pain that happens when the pace of building homes in the UK alongside the regulations that accompany the builds meets a lack of planning of broadband and telecomms infrastructure, with a few added bonuses.

New Forest Village in the Middleton suburb of South Leeds is an estate of approximately 1,300 properties. Permission was granted as part of efforts to try and regenerate this suburb, a suburb severely suffering from the decline of manufacturing in the north of England. Much of the surrounds are either former or current council / housing association housing. New Forest Village, in contrast, is nearly all private. It is a development built by a number of private builders as part of a consortium.

Ground was broken on the estate in 2005. It was completed and tools downed in 2014-15.

I've been involved with the estate in depth since 2012. At that time there were a couple of issues with the telecomms infrastructure.

Firstly residents were waiting months for phone lines. Openreach, the part of the BT Group tasked with installing lines to the estate, BT Group having struck an agreement with the consortium to do this, appeared unaware of how many premises their network would be required to serve. As a result there was a shortage of cables from parts of the estate back to the CO / exchange. This reached its zenith in 2013 when residents were waiting several months for basic telephone service, made all the more acute by a lack of quality mobile signal in a number of parts of the estate.

Secondly the only broadband service available was basic ADSL delivered from the Hunslet exchange. This exchange was 3.5km straight line distance and 6km+ of cable length from parts of the estate. ADSL is distance limited and residents were seeing speeds as slow as 0.5Mb/s. At that speed a 2 hour HD movie would take nearly 24 hours to download. It was faster to buy a Blu Ray from Amazon and use Prime. As far as streaming video goes - forget it at anything bar postage stamp size.

These issues were covered on local and national TV, and in online and offline press.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2012/11/fibre-for-middleton-broadband-campaign-criticises-bt-viability-assessments.html
http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/yep125/shock-gap-in-leeds-broadband-speeds-1-5537158
http://www.vidinfo.org/video/28750096/superscrimpers-south-leeds-slow-broadband

In my case I work from a home office. I was working regularly from the estate by 2013, and was on the brink of renting office space as I was simply unable to work as efficiently as I needed to on the broadband services available and we had no definitive date for when the services available would improve.

Eventually, in late 2012, a part of the estate received an upgrade in the form of Fibre to the Cabinet. A new street cabinet was erected and customers now connected to that drew their broadband signal from something that was a few hundred metres away, not 6km. Performance for some improved enormously. For others, however, the story was quite different and they were still stuck on ADSL.

I was focused on a specific area of the estate as that was where my now wife lived and where I thought there was the most chance of getting success. There were numerous hurdles in the way of getting the project done.

Firstly it took a while before Openreach updated their records. They took a snapshot of the estate from years before and used that information to make their decision as to whether or not to invest, the result being they thought there were a fraction of the homes connected that were actually there. When this was remedied Openreach confirmed, at the end of 2012, that they would be building fibre to the cabinet for the area I was focused on, dryly named Hunslet cabinet 82 after its designation within Openreach.

The decision was made but construction was a very slow process. Even by 2013, some 8 years after ground was broken, the road that the cabinet lay on, and where the newer cabinet needed to go, was still a private road, meaning that BT Group could not do any work on the roads or pavements there without the permission of the developers. This permission was not forthcoming as the developers feared that it would impact on their turning the road over to Leeds City Council. This is the adoption process, where after a period and upon agreement and subject to inspection the local authority take over maintenance of a road and pavements. Until this was done there was no way that Openreach could do their work. Even when the road did become public the costs to BT of building the cabinet were very high. As is customary and normal they were required to do full-width reinstatement on the pavements, not just filling in the holes they dug but completely resurfacing the pavements.

The completion of the project received considerable publicity from local and national television, print media, and indeed a press release on the Openreach website.

During 2013/14 Openreach also managed, at considerable cost, to bring enough copper from the exchange to deliver telephone and broadband services to all residents. The solution isn't the most elegant and lines will be both longer and lower quality than is ideal but the services are there. These exchange lines are required in order to purchase either ADSL broadband or the faster fibre to the cabinet solution.

By mid-2014 that first FTTC / fibre cabinet was completely full. All 288 connections were sold and a second one needed. This one was, perhaps somewhat bizarrely, far easier work. Openreach were able to build that second cabinet and reinstate just the pavement where they had excavated - no need to relay the entire pavement saving a considerable sum.

During 2012 BT Group weren't the only people our campaign was in discussion with. We approached other operators including Virgin Media. The entire Middleton and Belle Isle area was completely without any cable services, unusual given it's a residential suburb in the UK's 3rd most populous city. There were a few signs of cable services being a work in progress however it looked as though the money ran out literally overnight.

In early-mid 2015 Virgin Media began small-scale work at the west-most area of Middleton. This ramped up in scale as they went public with a plan to build to 4 million homes at a cost of £3 billion over the next 5 years. At one point there were nearly 40 simultaneous pieces of work going on in the Middleton and Belle Isle areas, and as of right now work is nearly complete on the project, after which time Virgin Media will move on to other parts of the city and other projects.

None of this work has happened in New Forest Village, and in the near future none will. An area with >65% take up of superfast broadband will have no ultrafast broadband options for the foreseeable future.

Virgin Media appreciated the high take up of Openreach services and were willing to spend half-again as much per property in New Forest Village as they would normally be prepared to to cater to the lay out of the estate, however the build is impossible. Many roads remain private on New Forest Village, perhaps 40% only are public roads. All of those private roads Leeds City Council would require to be in good repair when they take them over, meaning Virgin Media would be required to relay all pavements and roads they dig in full, dramatically increasing costs. Newly adopted roads, which would be a considerable proportion of that 40%, would also be required, as cabinet 82's road was, to be reinstated and relaid fully, not just the tracks they dig repaired.

Leeds City Council have every right to protect the public funds they manage and allowing streetworks on roads they have just adopted is perhaps a bridge too far.

Virgin Media have walked away. A considerable proportion of New Forest Village hasn't even begun the adoption process yet, and it will, best case, be at a guess 3 or more years before they can realistically return to the area. Their money is likely better spent building to 2,000 premises than New Forest Village's 1,300, and I have informed local residents that there's a pretty reasonable chance they simply won't come back, and no-one can blame them.New Forest Village is the only part of the Middleton Park ward that does not have access to ultrafast broadband. It is below average for urban areas and, at best, average across the UK, while having over three times the average level of demand.

For now, this isn't a deal breaker, however there are already some services that are out of reach for some on New Forest Village, and it's a complete unknown as to how long the existing services will be adequate for. The solution currently present is affected by distance from cabinet rather than exchange, and for those on the edges already some applications aren't an option.

Openreach probably cannot upgrade the estate for similar reasons to Virgin Media. Both of their solutions to higher speed broadband require construction work, none of which can feasibly be done to any scale within the estate.

The EU's digital agenda wants to see 50% of Europeans subscribed to a 100Mb or greater service by 2020. As of right now it's odds-on that a regeneration estate whose campaign helped bring ultrafast broadband throughout its local area will not have any such options. I guess it's one way the estate will have regenerated the area for sure.

The blame game is tempting, but who do you blame?

Virgin Media weren't in a position to bid on the initial telecomms infrastructure on the estate and even if they had been they may have been outbid.

Companies pay property developers for the right to supply to their estates.

Openreach were asked to produce an all-copper design and that is exactly what they have done. They cannot change the terms of that contract to replace copper with fibre.

Leeds City Council have a duty to council tax payers to spend their money as wisely as possible. As part of that it would be incredibly difficult for them to justify accepting roads under their maintenance that aren't in appropriate condition, or allowing them to be worked on shortly afterwards without full reinstatement. They need to invest in front-line services, not unnecessary road repair.

The developers cannot be held responsible for the original design either. It was done years ago, before superfast broadband was 'a thing'. They can, perhaps, be blamed to an extent for the time it has taken to construct the properties. It is not in their interests to bring too many properties up for sale at one time as it will affect their sale price. There was also an economic downturn part-way through that caused huge difficulties to housebuilding in the UK. The adoption process seems to have been extremely drawn out also, however I simply don't know enough about the facts to comment.

The 1,300 properties here seem to be victims mostly of timing.

Borrowing from a discussion with a journalist earlier today, the result of this will be that our household, as a 'top 1% user', will be dropping out of that 1% band simply because the services we need, and would pay for, to stay there aren't going to be available. As 4k video becomes more common people will see buffering, or be refused access to 4k services as their broadband is below the required level.

Most frustratingly: having played a part in bringing superfast broadband to hundreds and ultrafast to thousands, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.