NBN Co, BT join forces on broadband roadmap

British Telecom Chief executuve Gavin Patterson. Picture: Hollie Adams Source: News Corp Australia The company building the government’s National Broadband Network and Britain’s No 1 telco British Telecom have struck an agreement under which the two companies share information on how to better connect their respective nations with superfast broadband networks.

The agreement was struck last week when Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT — which like NBN is undertaking the mammoth task of connecting millions of homes to fibre-to-the-node networks — visited Australia to meet with clients, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and NBN chief executive Bill Morrow to talk about Australia’s NBN rollout.

“Gavin and I agreed that we are going to do more to share best practice between our companies,” Mr Morrow told The Australian.

“From a fibre-to-the-node perspective BT/Openreach has pulled off an extraordinarily efficient network rollout in the UK and we want to learn as much as we can from them. In terms of deployment we want to learn how BT was able to maintain such an extremely high rate of FTTN deployment — often passing 1 million homes per quarter — and bring that to bear on the NBN.”

As well as liaising with the likes of BT, NBN is also reaching out to leading HFC operators in Europe and North America to see what else it can learn from them. In his short stop in Australia, Mr Patterson endorsed the blueprint of Australia’s mixed-technology NBN rollout — which is also being deployed in Britain.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian Mr Patterson said the mixed-technology rollout of superfast broadband in Britain had allowed the company in five years to pass 85 per cent of the population of which 19 per cent had now signed up services with BT.

“We have invested £3 billion ($5.9bn) but to do FTTH (fibre-to-the-home) it would have been ten times that and the speed of deployment would have been at 10 per cent at this point,” Mr Patterson said. “The case for us to pay back on FTTH was simply not there, it’s easy to forget that we were entering a severe recession which was in many ways exacerbated in the UK. Our own company had its own issues to address so it was a big decision to do the fibre rollout in the first place but it’s proven to be a good one.”

Mr Turnbull has looked towards the British fibre rollout as a model for Australia’s NBN, preferring to use existing assets like Telstra’s copper and HFC networks as the basis of the build instead of replacing all existing infrastructure with an all fibre network as was promised under Labor.

The Coalition wants to cut back on the cost and time to deliver the build by rolling out fibre to nodes that will connect to Telstra’s copper network for the last few hundred metres.

While that method will be vastly cheaper, it means internet users will have slower download speeds than promised by Labor.

In Britain, BT’s wholesale infrastructure arm Openreach is spending about £3bn to roll out 3 million kilometres of fibre and 50,000 new cabinets for its fibre-to-the-cabinet and fibre-to-the-premises wholesale network.

But while Mr Patterson lauded the progress and success of its roll out, the project has been hit with some delays. The project was to be completed by 2015 but is now scheduled for completion by the end of 2017.

High-profile critics have also damned BT’s decision to adopt a FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) model, saying the copper tails could not deliver sufficient speeds and that the infrastructure would need to be replaced with fibre in the near-future to ensure download speeds could keep up with ­explosive growth of data-intensive applications.

But Mr Patterson said that breakthroughs in broadband technology — such as vectored DSL services — over the last five years had allowed network vendors to squeeze more speed out of existing copper networks.

It also meant the company was able to roll out its network in a more cost-efficient and timely manner.

“It demonstrated that you can get a lot more out of fibre to the cabinet type deployments than was first imagined. It’s not that FTTH doesn’t play a role in our mix. We never saw it as a FTTH vs FTTC fight, it’s a mixed economy as far as we’re concerned,” Mr ­Patterson said.

While BT doesn’t publish the speeds being achieved on its fibre network, the company said that on average, customers were getting a five-times speed increase versus speeds on the old copper network while the amount of data consumed had doubled.

According to Ofcom, the British telecoms regulator, the average British broadband speed is now 22.8 megabits per second (Mbps), up from 18.7Mbps in May 2014.

“When I joined BT in 2004 there were people who would say that the limits of physics meant the most you could ever get from a copper line was 8Mbps. These were people who said the world was flat and if we had listened to them we’d have probably made different decisions.

“Fast forward 10 years or so and we are getting 500Mbps plus through the same basic infrastructure. Different technology standards, working more closely with vendors and understanding how to use frequencies more efficiently have allowed us to get a lot more out of it.”

This story was first published in The Australian Business Review.