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Bt Strikes Deal To Legally Separate Openreach Division

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mikey4444 | 09:54 Fri 10th Mar 2017 | News
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39228115

As an ex-BT worker, I have mixed feelings about this. I hope this new deal doesn't mean that Openreach staff will get poorer working conditions and benefits.
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The monoplistic hold that BT has over our communications network is a scandal.
As anyone knows who has a different provider than BT, getting faults rectified by OpenReach is near impossible. The current set up is bad for customers, bad for industry and bad for the economy. Their slow roll out of rural broadband despite vast amounts of taxpayers money being thrown at them is fraudulent. If they had any morals they would pay back that money.
The replacement for OpenReach should be led by a consortium of the providers, and not just one.

Mikey - as a current Openreach employee, I can say that the perception on the ground is that this is a governance issue, and little will change in terms of company structure.

Hopefully not before I retire anyway!!
Gromit - //Their slow roll out of rural broadband despite vast amounts of taxpayers money being thrown at them is fraudulent. If they had any morals they would pay back that money. //

The rollout of broadband may be slow - but it is happening, and not from Virgin or PlusNet or any of the other providers who cherry-pick their markets for the cheap urban areas with maximum profits. They wouldn't touch rural customers with a barge pole.

There is a roll-out programme for rural customers but it costs vast amounts of resource and infrastructure, and that takes time, which is why it is perceived as being 'slow'.
A-H works for BT? Now that explains everything.
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Andy makes a good point here. Why is Virgin not hounded from pillar to post every day, as to why they are not providing cable internet access to all and sundry ? They do cherry pick, because they can !

BT is left with the universal obligation. In my area, we have had fibre-to-the-cabinet for 2 years and it works very well.

The difficulty with providing fast access speeds in rural areas, is effectively that BT is having to piggy-back this onto its existing many years-old network, that was first installed to provide telephony, not data transmission needs.

As far as I can see, Openreach is improving this situation as fast as it can, at huge expense.

So, perhaps Virgin would like to install their fibre cables, 100 miles into the country to help out !
jackdaw - //A-H works for BT? Now that explains everything. //

Thank heavens for that - maybe now you can leave me alone.
A-H

I'm sure if the private providers had been given £1.7Billion to connect rural customers, that it would have been happy to do it.

Incidently, OpenReach have had to pay back about £300 million of that subsidy. They said they needed £1.7billion because there would not be enough customers to pay for the infrastructure work. But they then got a high take up.
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Andy....don't feed the Trolls....it just keeps them up at night.
Mikey,
Give Virgin £1.7 Billion, and they will do it.
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Gromit....around where I live rural, means that sheep will outnumber humans by a factor of at least 1000. That is why is isn't economical to pay huge sums of money to cable into the country. I doubt Virgin would be interested in the small extra amount of business, that such a huge outlay would provide.
// That is why is isn't economical to pay huge sums of money to cable into the country. //

Open reach have had to pay back £300million of the subsidy because they said it wouldn't be economical - and then it was.

OpenReach has been a miserable failure for the industry and customers, but great for BT.
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Gromit....there is nothing stopping Virgin from expanding its network anywhere it wants, including the country. They don't need Openreach for that expansion.
Gromit
/// As anyone knows who has a different provider than BT, getting faults rectified by OpenReach is near impossible. ///

If they have a different provider than BT, how would they know about OpenReach's service?
// They don't need Openreach for that expansion. //

No. They need a £1.7 Billion subsidy like OpenReach.
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Gromit....the vast majority of internet access is though a telephone line, and will remain so far into the future, and all those telephones were and are still put in by BT.

So, giving Openreach a subsidy was and is the best way to improve speeds to the most amount of people.
Sheep outnumber people by 1000 to 1? You lucky guys in Wales are spoilt for choice.
“If they have a different provider than BT, how would they know about OpenReach's service?”

Because many telephone service providers (e.g. Sky) provide their services over a BT (i.e. Openreach) line. If the line develops a fault it is Openreach who fix it, not Sky.

These providers took advantage of what is known as “local loop unbundling” (LLU) where the lines from BT’s telephone exchanges to customer’s premises (the “local loop”) were made available to other service providers. EU member nations have an obligation to facilitate LLU to encourage competition in the telecoms industry but there is no likelihood of it being reversed post-Brexit.
Mickey, do you actually understand what Gromit was saying?

For some reason you feel Virgin should pay for it themselves, whearas Openreack should have 1.7Bn GBP. What is your reasoning behind that?
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NJ...you are right...it is LLU.

When BT was first hived off and privatised years ago, new telecoms providers found it all but impossible to compete with BT, as every telephone line in the country was installed by the Post Office, most of many years ago. In 1984, the internet business had yet to surface but as soon as it did, it quickly took over in importance terms for pure telephony.

So LLU had to be introduced, otherwise there would have been no other competitor to BT. It was resisted by BT at first, because it would meant allowing competitors access to BT plant and buildings.

So Openreach was formed and now is the first port of call for anyone wanting a telephone line.
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YMB...perhaps I haven't made myself clear.

I have no problem, in principle, to Virgin having access to a subsidy, in order to build its network. But by giving the subsidy to Openreach, many more people could have benefited, and have benefited from that subsidy, as BT still has the lions share of telephone lines in the UK.

As soon as the fibre-to-the-cabinet connection is available in an area, every internet company, not just BT, can avail itself of the much faster speeds that is made possible.

For instance, some of my neighbours say that they have their internet connections via Sky, but in reality, its still via BT and their phone line.

I still maintain, that Virgin is not really interested in providing links to rural populations, as that is not where the money will be made.

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