Virgin Media: Fujitsu fibre "better than BT"

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 29 Sep 2011 at 15:35

Fujitsu's proposed wholesale fibre network would be a better option for ISPs to rent space on than BT's network, according to Virgin Media.

The claim comes as the first active trial of a scheme to give rival operators access to BT's ducts and poles for fibre delivery gets under way in the Wirral.

Fujitsu is so far the only major company planning to go head-to-head with BT in efforts to push fibre further out into the UK communications network, and could benefit from Government funding for its fibre-to-the-home services.

The first step in Fujitsu's plans is the Wirral trial, where TalkTalk and Virgin will offer services over a 1Gbit/sec network to consumers in Greasby, initially at 100Mbits/sec.

According to Virgin, the big benefit of Fujitsu's network is its unmanaged nature, which enables ISPs to tailor their services.

This will help everyone in ensuring any allocation of money from BDUK is the result of a genuinely competitive process

"BT only offers Generic Ethernet Access (GEA) on its fibre optic products at the moment, which means we cannot replicate what we provide across our cable infrastructure as everything needs to be converted into IP delivery,” said a spokesperson for Virgin.

“Essentially everything then fights for the same bandwidth - like how your DSL broadband will slow if BT Vision needs some of it. The architecture of Fujitsu's infrastructure supports RFoG (Radio Frequency over Glass), which enables us to dedicate specific spectrum for each service.

“It's ultimately a better, more flexible service for everyone having that passive open network than to try to use something that's tightly managed such as BT."

Testing duct process

Fujitsu was not available to comment, but a successful trial could put it in contention to win some of the £530 million in Government funding aimed at pushing faster broadband into areas that would otherwise be left behind because they are not considered commercially viable.

The process of opening ducts up is seen as critical to enabling rivals to compete with BT, and could mean more competition for a slice of the public funding.

"What Fujitsu is doing is testing the logistics of working with BT in an area where before BT was the sole telecommunications infrastructure owner,” Virgin said. “This will help everyone in ensuring any allocation of money from BDUK is the result of a genuinely competitive process."

BT said its fibre infrastructure choices were based on a number of factors, not least a speedy rollout to as many homes as possible.

“RFoG technology is a good fit for Virgin as it enables them to uniquely replicate their pre-existing TV service," the company told PC Pro.

"However, BT decided from the outset that it needed to adopt an approach that would enable the fastest deployment of superfast broadband possible to the widest market possible, and would also be cost effective and deliverable in a consistent way. The GEA model we have adopted enables us to do that."