Votes trickle in on BT's broadband-ometer

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 11 Jul 2002 at 17:04

Encouragement for BT to broadband-enable exchanges - in the form of its online registration scheme - has yet to be reflected in the publicly-displayed totals. BT says full ISP data has yet to filter through...

BT Wholesale, which is looking after the scheme to record demand for broadband where exchanges are not currently ADSL-enabled, expects ISP-recorded expressions of interest to come more fully on stream within the month.

You can find the Broadband Registration Level check here, simply by entering a specific telephone number.

Among those exchanges inching towards the required threshold limits, Clwyd currently leads the way with 55 recorded expressions of interest. Its threshold limit, to be achieved before BT will ADSL-enable the exchange, is 400. Surveying other random areas, Middlewich of Cheshire stands at 19 (threshold of 350), Bolsover, Derbyshire 13 (400) and Aberdeen 9 (450)...

When demand reaches the threshold for an exchanges, BT will go ahead with the broadband upgrade, provided that ISPs can firm up the recorded demand. The scheme, which has already attracted criticisms as a thinly-veiled delaying tactic from BT, is part of BT's review of the status of 900 exchanges that do not yet support broadband. The telco has so far enabled 1,115 exchanges for broadband, which it claims serve 66 per cent of Britain's households. The exchanges featured in the review would extend this to 80 per cent of households.

An important point to note, for those frustrated with getting access to broadband, is that previous expressions of interest will be processed under the system. If you expressed interest to your ISP in the past, then - providing the ISP has logged that interest - this should be fed into the totals for the 'exchange barometers'.

As we mentioned in our previous report, BT displays the expressions of interest fed back to it by the ISPs - the system does not immediately display the number of times a potential customer has expressed interest. For example, one hundred people could express interest through the site, to various ISPs, but until those ISPs formally contact BT to update the totals, the barometer of interest will remain unchanged.

BT would not breakdown the figures in terms of which ISPs had supplied records of consumer demand.

Essentially, there is an unavoidable loop to the process. Because BT Wholesale - which is officially independent of BT's consumer ISP, OpenWorld - is supposed to treat all ISPs equally, it can not itself take direct orders for broadband. ISPs have to individually express their requirements, in terms of registered consumer demand. The message from BT Wholesale is: ensure your ISP registers your interest.

A spokesperson for BT agreed that the registration Web page wasn't very clear in explaining this delayed feedback feature to the process. No comment was forthcoming about the reportedly high number of broken links on the site.

Watch this space, as we keep an eye on the progress of the broadband registration scheme.