Report Slams British Telecom's 'Fiber to the Press Release' Tell me if you've heard this one before: a giant ISP receives countless tax breaks and subsidies over the years, yet instead of seriously upgrading its infrastructure -- does the bare minimum in terms of service quality, while desperately trying to ensure broadband competition remains as muted as possible. That's the charges being levied at British Telecom in the UK in a new report by parliament's culture, media and sport committee. The study says BT must ramp up funding for Openreach, the wholly BT-owned subsidiary responsible for most UK broadband infrastructure.

For many years British Telecom insisted that deploying fiber was "premature," settling on what we affectionately call " fiber to the press release " around these parts. British Telecom has been at the heart of UK promises to wire 95% of the country with broadband, but time and time again has come under fire for either failing to seriously finance the upgrades (again, despite subsidies and tax breaks galore) or by limiting competitor access to its wholesale network. And just like here in the States, the report notes that this charade was allowed to play out repeatedly thanks in large part to BT's significant influence on politicians. But BT is a bit different in that Openreach was created in 2006 by regulators in the belief that a new wholesale subsidiary would dramatically improve things by opening its lines to competing services. Instead, it's relatively clear BT did everything in its power to mute the benefits of such a concept. The report notes things weren't helped by a regulator (Ofcom) that failed to penalize the company for its intentional dysfunction. "BT has allowed service quality levels to remain low at Openreach in recent years = from an arguably low base - while investment in Openreach has been flat," the report notes. "Ofcom was slow to introduce minimum service standards with financial penalties for Openreach, some nine years after its creation." "BT Group is exploiting the position of vertical integration to make strategic decisions that favour the Group’s priorities and interests, at the expense of its access infrastructure business," the report continues. "Its current structure allows it to use Openreach’s utility-type assets to cross-subsidise riskier activities elsewhere in the Group, while significantly under-investing in the access infrastructure and services on which a large part of the public rely." The full report can be found The full report can be found here







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ohreally

join:2014-11-21 2 edits 2 recommendations ohreally Member I wouldn't agree that it's "FTTPR" You seem to use that term for providers that promise a big rollout but then do nothing, or cherry pick a couple of areas.



BT has done a lot. It's just mostly fibre to the cabinet, not fibre to the premises. That is still a significant upgrade for most people, it's just not as good as full FTTP would have been. Any subsidies that were given for broadband rollouts were used for broadband rollouts - just not always for the best technology.



I would agree with Parliament however - BT has spent far too much money on VDSL when they should have spent it on other stuff, and they've then gone on and spent the savings on irrelevant stuff like football rights. I wouldn't be against a split



I do not agree that BT has done anything to prevent wholesale access, though - with the exception of pole and duct access (which they are now forcibly opening up). Whatever technology BT deploys in an area is available to anyone else - be that ADSL, VDSL or FTTP - the instant BT makes it available to itself and at a fair, regulated price



Openreach's service standards may be low in some respects, but it is worth pointing out that this affects BT's own retail customers. You do not get better service by going with BT direct. If Brand X ISP Ltd is having trouble getting you a working service because of Openreach incompetence, that won't disappear if you switched to BT.