BT charges average of £1,500 for fibre-on-demand

 

Gallery

By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 5 Dec 2012 at 10:44

BT has finally released prices for its fibre-on-demand services for small businesses and consumers.

The service, called Fibre-to-the-Premises on Demand (FoD), will allow businesses and homeowners not due to be upgraded to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) to pay to have a cable run to their premises, provided they fall within the company's fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) footprint.

Plugging into the network won't come cheap, however, with costs estimated at £1,000 for premises 500m from their network node, which according to BT is just under the average distance for most business.

There will also be an additional installation charge of £500, but BT points out the costs are significantly lower than for Ethernet services that SMEs might otherwise sign up for.

[We've given an indication of what the pricing will be and see this being something for small and medium businesses

"The pricing is to connect the premises to the network aggregation node and depends on distance," a BT spokesperson told PC Pro. "We've given an indication of what the pricing will be and see this being something for small and medium businesses."

Timescales for specific locations remain vague. The option of paying for a fibre line will be extended from initial trial areas to all FTTC regions, starting with a soft launch from spring next year and an ongoing rollout, the company said.

BT also said it was planning to cut the rental for all FTTP services – including those hooking up via fibre on demand - in a bid to improve take-up of FTTP connections where they are already available.

According to BT, the wholesale prices for the GEA-FTTP with 330Mbits/sec download and 30Mbits/sec upload speeds would be reduced from £60 a month to £38, although the company said it couldn't be sure whether ISPs would pass the price cuts onto customers.

While the fibre on demand services are aimed at businesses, companies considering the option instead of more expensive Ethernet connection will also need to consider service level agreements for the products. Ethernet is a business grade connection with faster fault repair promises than FTTP connections.