We’ve been waiting for years for true “superfast” fibre-optic broadband, but now it’s here it seems few people actually want it. At least, that’s the impression given by Ofcom chief Ed Richards’ comments earlier this week, when he said superfast (24Mbits/sec+) broadband uptake was “still low” and largely confined to families with teenage children.

How low is “low”? We asked BT for its latest fibre figures. More than six million premises now have access to BT’s fibre lines, but only 300,000 customers have actually signed up for the service. That’s a less than impressive sounding conversion rate of 5%.

It’s even less impressive when you consider that BT Infinity fibre costs no more than the company’s most expensive ADSL package, and that the company admits to “really going for it” in terms of marketing fibre to customers. People are being offered an effectively free speed upgrade and many seemingly don’t want it.

Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

In BT’s defence, its conversion rate is much higher than this time last year, when the company had signed up only 38,000 out of three million fibre-enabled households, a success ratio of only 1.5%. And its chief rival is doing no better. Virgin Media’s Q3 financial report reveals that eight million homes now have access to its 100Mbits/sec service, but only 187,000 of its customers are on 50Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec lines – a conversion ratio of only 2.3%.

Reasons for refusing fibre

So what’s going wrong? Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

There could certainly be an element of once bitten twice shy. For years, broadband providers have over-egged their advertised broadband speeds with the largely fictional “up to” speeds. According to Ofcom’s latest fixed-line research, the UK’s actual average broadband speed is 6.8Mbits/sec, but the average advertised speed is 15Mbits/sec. The broadband providers have only themselves – and the ever-pliant Advertising Standards Authority – to blame if nobody now believes their speed claims.

Price is clearly a major factor, too. Virgin’s 100Mbits/sec service costs £35 a month (when taken with a Virgin phone line), but its cheapest 10Mbits/sec package costs only £13.50 – almost a third of the price. And while BT does indeed match the price of its top-end ADSL and fibre packages, you can get BT’s up to 20Mbits/sec ADSL for as little as £13 (plus line rental), compared to the minimum £28 per month outlay for fibre. When the whole country’s looking after the pennies, people need a pretty good reason to upgrade.

And what is that reason? Remember that, to date, fibre has largely been rolled out in inner-city areas, places that already had fairly decent ADSL speeds. For the average consumer (who is far less demanding of their broadband than the average PC Pro reader), there are few apps or services that would run a great deal more smoothly on a 40/50/100Mbits/sec line than they would on a 10 or 20Mbits/sec ADSL connection.  Unless you’re downloading multiple HD video streams – as you might in Ed Richards’ stereotypical teenage family – there is currently no compelling reason for the man in the street to upgrade.

The people who would surely jump at the chance of a fibre speeds are those in rural areas, smaller towns or on the edge of exchanges, for whom the jump from only 1 or 2Mbits/sec – or even slower – to 40Mbits/sec and beyond would be truly life changing. A point that was reportedly made by senior telco execs at a recent conference in Denmark. But, of course, they’re harder and more expensive to reach.

But with BT admitting its business case was based on 20% of broadband customers making the jump to fibre at this week’s Westminster eForum – four times its current conversion ratio – you can’t help but wonder whether it may regret taking the soft option first.

When you’ve dug yourself a hole, stop digging. Or if you’re the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), keep going until you hit the molten core of the Earth itself.

Regular PC Pro readers will know how the ASA has allowed ISPs to over-egg the speed of their broadband connections by permitting them to advertise fantasy “up to” speeds, which Ofcom’s research has proven time and again are pure fiction. Even Ofcom itself called for this insidious practice to stop over a year ago, since when the ASA has dithered with a year-long consultation on the use of “up to” speeds, but still hasn’t arrived at a conclusion.

Consequently, one ISP took matters into its own hands. Last year, Virgin Media launched its Stop The Broadband Con website, calling on ISPs to advertise typical rather than maximum speeds – very similar recommendations to those made by Ofcom itself.

Virgin, of course, has very good reason to make such calls. Ofcom’s research has repeatedly shown that Virgin’s actual connection speeds are much closer to the advertised headline speed than those offered by the ADSL providers.

Here, according to Ofcom, is the distribution of maximum and average download speeds for customers of “up to” 20Mbits/sec or 24Mbits/sec ADSL packages (click to enlarge graph):

And here is the distribution of maximum and average download speeds for customers on Virgin’s “up to” 20Mbits/sec cable lines:

As we can see, only 1% of ADSL customers get a maximum speed in excess of 18Mbits/sec. None get an average speed higher than 18Mbits/sec. Are those customers being conned when they’re sold “up to” 24Mbits/sec lines? In at least 99% of cases, yes.

Virgin made that very same point on its website. After complaints from rivals Sky and BT, the ASA decided that was beyond the pale, and ordered Virgin to shut down the site and not run its ads again.

“[We] considered the text “Not getting the broadband speed you’re paying for … Stop the broadband con” was also likely to be interpreted as suggesting other ISPs dealt with consumers dishonestly in relation to broadband speeds, rather than as highlighting Virgin’s concerns about the disparity they believed existed between broadband advertising and speeds delivered to consumers. We therefore concluded that the claims were denigratory.”

So outright exaggeration of ADSL speeds is fine; pointing this out isn’t.

Faster speeds “not better”

The ASA made another extraordinary statement regarding broadband speeds. Both Sky and BT had challenged Virgin’s assertion that “faster connection would always give a perceivable benefit for surfing the web and watching TV online”. Sky also moaned about Virgin’s assertion that an average ADSL speed of only 6.5Mbits/sec would lead to “buffering delays” compared to Virgin’s cable services.

The ASA, inexplicably, backed BT and Sky with one of the most technically inept judgements I’ve ever had the misfortune to read.

“We understood that, in order to surf the web or stream TV online without interruptions, consumers would need a certain amount of bandwidth and that some ADSL customers would have sufficient bandwidth to do so, even if their service was used concurrently. We noted that Virgin would therefore be unable to offer those ADSL customers who were not experiencing interruption problems an improved broadband experience.”

Here, the ASA appears to be claiming that a 20Mbits/sec Virgin cable line with an average speed in excess of 18Mbits/sec for the vast majority of customers, wouldn’t necessarily offer “an improved experience” over an ADSL line where only 1% of people get in excess of 18Mbits/sec. That is categorically wrong. If you’re waiting for a HD iPlayer video to buffer before playback, an 18Mbits/sec connection will start playing more quickly than a 6.5Mbit/sec connection every single time.

Not to mention the fact that you need a steady connection of at least 4Mbits/sec to even watch HD iPlayer streams –  something that 41% of customers on “up to 24Mbits/sec” ADSL lines simply can’t achieve, according to Ofcom’s empirical research.

Yet, because the ASA “had not seen evidence that a speed of 6.5 Mbits/sec would cause delays for internet users in all instances, we concluded that the claim was misleading”.

It’s one thing to allow ISPs to peddle lies about their broadband speeds; it’s quite another to censure another ISP when they point them out. The ASA is entirely responsible for the broadband con. It’s high time it stopped.

The BBC has been one of the most vociferous defenders of net neutrality – the concept that all internet traffic is treated equally.  However, a couple of deals struck with BT suggest the BBC isn’t as wedded to net neutrality as it likes to claim.

What the BBC says

First, let’s recall what the BBC has said publicly about net neutrality and ISPs discriminating between different types of traffic in the past.

As recently as last October, the BBC’s director of future media and technology, Erik Huggers, wrote a landmark blog, outlining the Beeb’s stance on net neutrality.

“An emerging trend towards network operators discriminating in favour of certain traffic based on who provides it, as part of commercial arrangements, is a worrying development,” Huggers wrote.

“Why? For companies that can pay for prioritisation, their traffic will go in a special fast lane. But for those that don’t pay? Or can’t pay? By implication, their traffic will be de-prioritised and placed in the slow lane. Discriminating against traffic in this way would distort competition to the detriment of the public and the UK’s creative economy.

“The founding principle of the internet is that everyone – from individuals to global companies – has equal access. Since the beginning, the internet has been ‘neutral’, and everyone has been treated the same. But the emergence of fast and slow lanes allows broadband providers to effectively pick and choose what you see first and fastest.”

And lest we think this was Huggers shooting from the hip on a blog post, the BBC also submitted a response to Ofcom’s net neutrality consultation (PDF) last year, which arrived at the same conclusion.

“The BBC believes that traffic management should only be used at a minimum for technical and legal reasons. In our view, discriminating traffic by content provider or origin will distort competition and deviate from the end-to-end principle which is at the core of the internet.”

What the BBC does

Despite taking a rigid stance against discrimination between different content providers and internet “fast lanes”, the BBC appears fairly relaxed about the situation when it stands to benefit.

For example, content from the BBC iPlayer was used in a 2009 trial of BT Wholesale’s Content Connect service. Content Connect is BT’s new content distribution network (CDN), which effectively puts video content in the “fast lane”, ensuring customers get a smooth video stream from selected broadcasters.

In some ways, there’s nothing new about this: the BBC has worked with CDNs such as Akamai in the past, paying these companies to push video content closer to consumers and easing the burden on networks. However, there is a crucial difference: Akamai has no relationship with end users. BT, on the other hand, has stated publicly that it plans to charge both content providers and consumers for premium services delivered over Content Connect. As Huggers himself stated: “For those that don’t pay? Or can’t pay? By implication, their traffic will be de-prioritised and placed in the slow lane.”

The BBC told me that it “does not have a commercial relationship with BT Wholesale’s Content Connect service”. However, it most certainly does have a commercial relationship with BT Retail – the arm of BT that provides broadband to consumers, and which also delivers BBC iPlayer programmes over its BT Vision IPTV service. How does BT ensure those Vision video streams reach customers smoothly? By using Content Connect.

The BBC (nor any other broadcaster whose programmes are delivered over BT Vision) doesn’t currently pay BT to benefit from these “fast lane” streams. But there is no doubt that this arrangement gives the BBC a commercial advantage over rival broadcasters, who don’t have access to the fast lane. Especially as BT Vision sets aside a dedicated chunk of a customer’s bandwidth when streaming video, meaning someone else in the house trying to stream HD video on a laptop, for example, will likely suffer.

In other words, it’s exactly the “emergence of fast and slow lanes [that] allows broadband providers to effectively pick and choose what you see first and fastest” that Huggers railed against in last October’s blog.

The BBC’s response

When I asked the BBC to comment on this apparent contradiction between its support for net neutrality and its dealings with BT, a spokesman said: “We wish to make BBC iPlayer available over the open internet to platforms and devices on a fair basis, with the aim to ensure pay-TV customers also continue to enjoy a high-quality BBC iPlayer experience.  We keep all deals under review in light of BBC’s strategic priorities and policies, our commitment to an open internet and rapid market developments.”

I have some sympathy for the BBC: net neutrality is a hideously complex topic, and decisions made with the best interests of viewers in mind can sometimes compromise principles. But I’m fairly sure the BBC would be screaming from the rooftops if commercial broadcasters were being handed the kind of competitive advantage it’s currently benefiting from, and it was the BBC being left in the “slow lane”.

For the past couple of days I’ve been with BT in Northern Ireland, visiting homes and businesses that have been among the first in the UK to be hooked up to BT’s fibre broadband network.

If you’re one of those people who can’t understand why Britain needs a decent high-speed network, or think that rural campaigners are greedy for demanding proper broadband in their area, you should listen to the stories from the people we visited in Northern Ireland.

People such as Paul Sherry, Hugh Morgan and Joseph Ireland – three ambitious young men who set up their own company while midway through their degrees, because they could see that there would be no jobs in the flagging construction industry waiting for them when they finished their studies.

They run Energy Assessments NI, a company that certifies the energy efficiency of new buildings as required by EU law. Much of their work involves sending and receiving large architectural drawings over email, or delivering certificates electronically to their customers – tasks that are painfully slow or just aren’t possible without a decent broadband connection.

On their rickety old ADSL connection, it could take 15 minutes just to upload one of the files spat out by their software – if it even uploaded at all. Now, with the 10Mbits/sec uploads on their fibre connection, that file is uploaded in seconds, allowing them to correct errors instantly and get on with the rest of their work, not sit staring at a stuttering progress bar.

Because they’ve now got a broadband connection worthy of its name, three young men who would otherwise have joined the ranks of the unemployed can compete for valuable contracts with councils across the UK

And so, because they’ve now got a broadband connection worthy of its name, three young men who would otherwise have joined the ranks of the unemployed can compete for valuable contracts with councils across the UK – all from a modest, low-rent office in their hometown of Newcastle.

Then there’s John Paul Annett, who runs a picture framing business and garden centre in County Down. The bulk of Annett’s business involves downloading images over the internet, then printing and framing the artwork for retail customers across the UK. Because uploading high-quality images on his old ADSL connection was so horribly slow, Annett used to showcase the company’s wares in glossy catalogues that cost about £6 each to print. Now, with a decent fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connection installed in his remote factory, he can send them out via email in the PDF format. “If you can send them by email, it saves you a fortune,” he told me.

Reduced printing costs aren’t the only benefit: when interior designers ring up asking for examples of his work, he doesn’t have to ask them to wait two days for the catalogue to arrive in the post. He can email them a brochure or high-res JPEG of a bespoke frame he has in mind and clinch a deal that, previously, the buyer would have almost certainly have got bored of waiting for.

It’s also been possible for his in-house web designer to add short videos of their work to YouTube, so customers can see the care and workmanship that goes into his picture frames. “The frustration factor’s gone,” said Annett.

The Energy Assessments trio and Annett are the lucky ones: beneficiaries of a forward-thinking local minister, an EU grant, and BT’s decision to match public money with its own to bring fibre to the vast majority of Northern Ireland’s businesses. The rest of the UK’s rural regions aren’t as fortunate, with many still running on dial-up quality connections that literally cripple their livelihoods.

BT plans to cover two thirds of the British population with fibre by 2015, and while that’s encouraging, it’s not enough. While the Government still fiddles with regional broadband pilots and spends months trying to define its own, ridiculous targets, businesses are going to the wall – or not even starting in the first place – because their internet connections just aren’t fast enough.

Whether it’s BT or Virgin, our own Government or the EU, a combination of all four or someone else entirely – someone needs to find the money to deliver fibre right across the country.  We can’t afford not to.

Why, you might well think, do I have to wait that long? I was despatched to one of BT’s FTTP trials in Milton Keynes to find out how much work goes on behind the scenes, and this blog post will reveal everything you need to know — probably more than you ever wanted to know — about the labour put in by engineers to get a tiny little cable to your home.

Two things to keep in mind: first, Milton Keynes, being a newish sort of place, has a well-planned duct system, making the trial a bit more straightforward than it could be in other locales. FTTP in older cities won’t be so easy or even possible, while others will get fibre access over telegraph poles instead.

The other thing to remember is this: fibre is really, really thin. Surprisingly so.

The fibre in that picture isn’t the coloured bits — it’s the thin, hair-like strand sticking out of the end. The coloured material is to protect the delicate fibres.

The trial requires all-new cabling and the use of subducts, where the fibre is squeezed in alongside existing infrastructure. While keeping cables small is easier with fibre because it’s so thin, that also makes it breakable, so protective cables need to be thick enough to keep the fibre safe.

From each exchange in the test area in Milton Keynes, cables with a dozen fibres feed out to a splitter. There, each is fibre is spliced and split out to supply 32 customers — although BT usually keeps two aside for backup.  The fibre winds its way through tubes in subducts to a local distribution point and a device called a manifold, which shares the fibre connection out to up to a dozen properties, but usually about half that.

(See that little hole in the wall at the top of the picture? That’s where all the cables need to go through. The device on the left with the cables feeding in is the distribution point, while the black tube on the right is a manifold.)

If the thinness of fibre makes it seem easy to handle, don’t be fooled. All the cabling is pulled through ducts by hand: no machinery can do it properly. That’s no small thing, as in the trial area in Milton Keynes alone, there’s 600km of cables as well as 4,000 manifolds and 1,000 distribution points to install — all to bring fibre broadband to 11,500 homes. Even if you don’t know what all that equipment is, the point is there’s a lot of it.

The fibre isn’t in the cables when it’s pulled through, however. The fibre cables are blown through the duct tubes using compressed air. Because this can be done over some distance, and BT would rather not shell out for a engineer just to stand at the end of a tube and wait for fibre to slide out, the system texts the engineer when it’s time to stop blowing, so the right amount of fibre is sent through.

(Fibre after it’s blown through a tube. Exciting times.)

All these bits of fibre — from the exchange to the splitter to the distro point to the manifold and then to the premise — need to be connected up. This is called splicing, and is rather like gluing together the ends of two pieces of hair.  The engineer carefully strips off the fibre’s protective coating, exposing the actual fibre — which is easy to break and easy to get lodged in your skin.

The exposed fibre is cleaned with rubbing alcohol — the engineer actually listens for a squeak to make sure it’s clean — and the ends cut so they’re square, before being slid into a small box called a fusion splicer, which lines everything up and joins the ends. Watching the screen (see the picture below), shows the fibre ends being adjusted up and down until they line up perfectly, before the screen is filled with a satisfying sci-fi blast of white light, and the pieces are fused together.

BT tolerates a loss of up to 0.05db in the splicing process, but this machinery is so handy to use that I managed to join two pieces of fibre with just 0.03db loss on my first — heavily-coached — try.

When BT rolls out FTTP, it installs fibre from the exchange all the way down to the manifolds, but pauses there, only installing the last several yards to the house once the customer has coughed up the cash. “We’ve got to give the facility to every house,” noted one BT engineer. “It sits there dormant until such a time as a customer puts his hand up and says ‘yes, I want it’.”

Once the customer opts for the FTTP service, a specialised engineer comes out. Over the course of seven hours, he or she blows fibre through to the customer’s house, splicing the fibre to an external connector attached to the side of the customer’s wall, which connects to a lead internally to the “optical network terminal point” inside the house — essentially a BT-branded box with (hopefully) blinking lights and ports to plug a router into.

And if you’ve got one of these in your house, consider us jealous, because it means you’ve got BT’s FTTP.

I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic.  #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.

Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.

So Britain’s two biggest ISPs, with more than seven million customers between them, would happily cripple a publicly-funded service for a pot of cash. And for those, like my colleagues David Fearon and Tim Danton on last week’s PC Pro podcast, who argue that this is an over-reaction, that giving one service priority over another doesn’t mean the other wouldn’t work, ask yourself this: why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Worse still, we’re not only talking about giving one more bandwidth than the other: the prospect of ISPs actually cutting off websites because their rivals have paid for exclusivity is also being discussed at the very highest levels.

Nigel Hickson, head of EU and international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, said the Government was actively considering the following type of scenario:

“I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says – Father, I can’t access Facebook anymore. I say – why? She says – it is quite obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever don’t take Facebook anymore, Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but YouTube has so I have gone to YouTube. Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question that we face.”

For most people, the answer to that question would be ‘absolutely not’. For telecoms regulator Ofcom, the answer is ‘bring it on’.

Laissez-faire regulator

Ofcom has recently completed a public consultation on net neutrality. The results are absolutely frightening, if Alex Blowers, the regulator’s international director, is to be believed.

When I asked him specifically if Ofcom had any objections to content owners paying ISPs for preferential traffic, he replied:

“We were very clear in our discussion document that we see the real economic merits to the idea of allowing a two-sided market to emerge, particularly for applications like IPTV where it seems to us that the consumer expectation will be a surface which is of a reasonably consistent quality that allows you to actually sit down at the beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems of jitter or the picture hanging or whatever.

So from our point of view we were pretty clear on that point, and nobody has yet knocked us off that view that a two-sided market could be economically beneficial. The issue is, as always, the devil is in the detail.”

To be fair to Blowers, he did say that both the EU and Ofcom would demand transparency from the ISPs, and that the EU would almost certainly object to the outright blocking of legal services. But just because a particular website or service isn’t blocked, it doesn’t mean it can’t suffer irreparable damage.

The Skype problem

Net neutrality has already been smashed by most of Britain’s biggest ISPs. All of the big six British ISPs routinely discriminate between different types of internet traffic: putting the brakes on peer-to-peer traffic during peak hours, for example. They claim this is necessary to deliver a smooth and consistent service to all of their customers, although it’s worth noting that the seven-time winner of PC Pro’s broadband ISP award, Zen Internet, doesn’t deploy traffic management (and is routinely praised for the speed of its connections), nor do some of the big ISPs in the US.

Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too

This blanket discrimination against certain protocols can be enormously damaging. Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too.

As Skype’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel, pointed out:

“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging, they go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things like the BBC iPlayer [which used to be P2P] or indeed Skype, which is both a VoIP and a peer-to-peer application. So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth at all, why should that be de‐prioritised because it’s peer-to-peer as opposed to any other applications.”

Sahel pointed to the mobile market as a prime example of the harmful effects of such blocking. Skype is routinely blocked – both by protocol and specifically – by British mobile networks, who are worried that the VoIP service would harm their voice revenues. Campaigners such as The Open Rights Group’s chief executive Jim Killock are worried that fixed-line broadband is heading down the same path:

“You look at the levels of restriction on devices in the mobile sector compared to what we are able to do on our computers at home and it’s an entirely different world. This is why I say look at the mobile market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to work in the future because that is sort of where these things are leading.”

Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare, and the powers that be think it’s a good thing.

There are two ways to get hold of this information:

Sam Knows Broadband has an excellent Exchange Checker that tells you if and when BT plans to lay fibre in your neck of the woods, as well as providing detailed information on the availability of ADSL, cable and LLU providers in your area. To see if fibre’s coming to your area, enter your postcode, scroll down to the BT Wholesale section, and check the date alongside “FTTC status”. (FTTC stands for fibre-to-the-cabinet, BT’s up to 40Mbits/sec fibre service.)

BT Openreach, the division of BT responsible for network deployment, also publishes a PDF document with the full list of exchanges on its Super-Fast Fibre Access Site. Click on the “Where and When” link at the top of the page to download the list.

It’s worth noting that there are some discrepancies between the two sites. For example, SamKnows claims my local Burgess Hill exchange will be upgraded in December 2010; BT’s list says we won’t get fibre until March 2012. The culprit, I suspect, is that little asterisk next to Burgess Hill and many other towns on the BT list.

The footnote explains that sites marked with an asterisk have had their fibre rollout delayed as BT’s plans have changed. “No exchanges have been removed from the list and we are still planning to deliver fibre to these areas by the revised date shown in the table,” BT explains. In other words, don’t hold your breath.

One hundred and twenty two emails, to get an order progressed with our national telecoms carrier. It almost beggars belief – but, for those of us who view telecoms connectivity as part of the very first stages of our WAN rollouts, it’s rapidly becoming the longest, most painful and least controllable part of any project. The reason, in this case, is because the order was placed with a BT Local Business (BTLB) unit.

I don’t like the word “unit” here, but it bears examination: it covers up the multitude of sins which underpin this catalogue of disasters, and is in fact the core of the problem. A Local Business Unit is, in fact, not a part of BT itself: it is a local telecoms company that has gained the right to represent itself as if it was a genuine part of the surrounding BT universe.

Some of these local businesses represent themselves correctly (for instance, Business Communications Solutions Ltd), while others (such as BT Local Business Rotherham) take full advantage of the blurring offered by the BT umbrella.

I’m sure this looks quite marvellous to the macroeconomics gurus within BT; they put the local sales guys on the spot and give them the chance to sink or swim, using BT’s customer base as a sales lead generator and keeping lots of long-winded phone calls out of the BT call centres, while those people who whinge about faceless corporate giants get a local point of contact (though it amuses me to see my second example claim to be located in Rotherham, but ‘local’ to the Humber. I know Hull has its own telecomms company and there’s not much BT penetration in those parts, but people from East Hull don’t think of West Hull types as ‘local’ – lord only knows what they think of someone from Rotherham!).

Local is meant to be good; if you wander about the BT tradespace website you can see they have even built up a load of mechanisms for people to be “fans” of their BTLB, aping Facebook.

I don’t think anyone’s going to be a fan of a BTLB that takes more than a hundred emails to complete an order, though. This is where the trouble starts. One of the big advantages of a corporate is that they have unified information systems, so if someone is away on holiday it’s possible to work out the progress of an order. A BTLB has access to BT’s internal systems – but there is little or no guarantee they can use them, or that they operate in a way you would expect when placing a business-critical order.

BTLB’s are also separate companies, so they carry out their own credit checks on customers, even if that customer has been using BT since the mid-1970’s – and if there turns out to be a problem, they can simply stop without warning – while bills in the tens of thousands per quarter are still being paid to BT, because “that’s a different department, sir”.

Chasing up on a BTLB that underperforms is nigh-on impossible, because the public has no access to the group that manages or evaluates BTLB performance. Given this sneaky separation of credit risk and sales to a third party, one is obliged to wonder what might happen if the third party operating the BTLB licence was to go to the wall.

We often mention the toothlessness of Ofcom here; it’s scary to think that someone in BT imagines that the divestiture of responsibility to an invisible selection of previously unknown local companies, with widely varying levels of skill and professionalism, is anything like an improvement for the customer.

(PS. the two BTLBs linked to here are NOT the one which needed the 122 emails!)

In a nutshell, anyone who provides an open Wi-Fi connection – be that a company with a free hotspot in their reception or a home user who decides to leave their router unprotected – will be held responsible if someone downloads copyrighted material on their connection. (Unless, bizarrely, they are a coffee shop or other business that offers Wi-Fi access in conjunction with other goods or services, in which cased they’re treated as an ISP).

In its draft proposals, Ofcom issued the following guidance:

“Those who wish to continue to enable others to access their service will need to consider whether [to] take steps to protect their networks against use for infringement, to avoid the consequences that may follow.”

When I asked Ofcom’s press office what steps someone could take to safeguard their network, other than password-protection – which by definition means the end of open Wi-Fi – the regulator unhelpfully suggested that users should talk to their ISPs.

At a Westminster e-Forum on file-sharing yesterday, BT’s director of group industry policy, Simon Milner, summed up the ridiculousness of this position. “How on earth do you try to prove that you didn’t infringe copyright [on your Wi-Fi connection] and didn’t take reasonable steps [to protect the connection]?” he asked.

Joining BT on the panel was Ofcom’s director of policy development, Campbell Cowie. So I once again took the opportunity to ask him how people can run open Wi-Fi connections and not be held responsible for passers-by downloading copyrighted music on them. His reply: “Your ISP is best placed to advise”.

This simply won’t do. It’s pure cowardice on the part of the regulator to issue proposals stating that those operating Wi-Fi hotspots will be held responsible for the actions of others, and then not tell hotspot owners how they can protect themselves.

As Lord Lucas, who was chairing the debate, said after hearing Ofcom’s reply to my question: “I do think Ofcom is ducking its responsibility.”

“These are critical bits of proof that people ought to have available to them,” Lucas added. “We have to provide consumers with a good and robust defence.”

We need answers, Ofcom. And we need them fast.

For many years now, BT has been claiming it simply cannot afford to deliver fibre broadband to large parts of the country. In 2008, the Broadband Stakeholder Group claimed it would cost £5.1 billion to deliver nationwide Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) – a figure that BT itself has repeated in public.

However, a press release issued by none other than BT today provides a fascinating insight into the economics of fibre broadband – and casts some doubt over the accuracy of those lofty figures.

In what BT describes as a “fibre triumph”, a local council in Kent has contributed to the cost of deploying fibre in the village of Iwade. According to BT, the council stumped up £13,000, which “unlocked” £62,000 of investment from the telco, meaning it cost a total of £75,000 to bring fibre to each of the village’s 1,350 premises.

Those figures (which I’ve double checked with BT) mean that it cost £55.56 per property to bring fibre to the village.

Extrapolate those figures nationwide – and I realise there’s enormous danger in doing so – and the figures become even more interesting. There are about 25 million residential properties in the UK, and although I can’t find a reliable figure for the number of business premises, there were 2.1 million registered enterprises in 2009. Let’s assume an average of two buildings per business, and we’re looking at 29.2 million premises across the country.

So the total cost of delivering FTTC to the country is:

29.2 million x £55.56 = £1.622 billion

That’s a hell of a lot less than the £5.1 billion projected by the Broadband Stakeholder Group, even if the business premises assumptions are a bit skew-whiff.

Questionable figures?

Now, I accept that basing nationwide figures on the experience of one small village is dubious. As a BT spokesperson told me this morning: “That figure is unique to Iwade,” and the economics of each location vary on a case-by-case basis.

What’s more, “In the case of Iwade, three of the four [telephone] cabinets in Iwade met the BT Openreach business case for FTTC enablement but a fourth did not – by providing public funding to bridge the gap in the commercial case, Iwade’s Parish Council has taken action to ensure that the whole village can benefit from super-fast speeds.”

Nevertheless, BT’s spokesperson also admitted it would be fair to assume that rural Iwade wouldn’t have been included in the two thirds of the country BT has promised to fibre by 2015. That means it’s in the most expensive third of the country – the areas where BT says it can’t afford to invest by itself, meaning the cost of laying FTTC to two thirds of the country is likely (and I stress likely) to be much less than the £55.56 per head it costs in Iwade.

There will, of course, also be a fair number of very remote areas where there’s only a handful of houses on each cabinet, where the cost per head could well run into the hundreds or even thousands of pounds.

New hope

That said, if the experience of Iwade is even remotely close to typical, then the cost of bringing up to 40Mbits/sec fibre to the entire country is much less than first thought. Indeed, the fact that BT recently increased its rollout from half to two-thirds of the country by 2015 suggests that the company isn’t finding the costs prohibitive either.

The Iwade experience also makes you wonder how many other towns and villages are being left out of the fibre broadband loop, for relatively paltry sums. If £13,000 – the cost of a cleaner at the town hall – is all that’s needed to trigger high-speed broadband in some rural areas, I expect many councils would write the cheque tomorrow. Especially when small businesses are moving out or going to the wall because they can’t get reliable broadband connections, as is the case in South Derbyshire and many other areas.

The problem is BT’s keeping everyone in the dark about the bulk of its fibre plans. It says it will reach two thirds of the country, but won’t reveal which two thirds: only a few hundred exchanges have been identified to date. How are councils meant to work out if they should pump public money into fibre broadband if they don’t know whether it’s going to reach their area or not?

The BT spokesperson urged councils to talk to their local BT Group Regional Manager and find out how much it would cost to bring fibre to their area, and insisted that “Openreach will not take public or private money for cabinets and exchange areas that [already] meet its business case”.

But BT owes it to the public to announce which exchanges will be covered by its fibre rollout – and when – as soon as it possibly can, so that we all know where we stand.