Re BT, Openreach & TalkTalk (& others).
First, in the interests of openness, I am ex-BT. I started in 1959 as an apprentice when it was a division of the GPO and left 35 years later when it was a fully fledged plc. I accept that because of this I will be accused of being biased.
BT is on a hiding to nothing. It inherited the complete telephone structure of this country back whenever, including all the problems of it's predecessors. People will talk of having to wait months if not years for telephone service. They will remember the bad old days when it took anything up to 1/2 a minute for a STD call to connect. And that one could only have instruments provided by the one company (Post Office Telephones, Post Office Telecommunications etc) . BT also inherited the requirement to provide telephone service throughout the UK.
Now lets look at some of these things. For a start, when it was a division of the Post Office, it was a Crown office and as such its finances, specifically capital expenditure was tightly controlled by the Treasury. Which meant that in times of stringency, it was not allowed to spend money on new line plant or new exchanges hence the situation of having to wait months and years for telephone service. With the best will in the world, no company can quickly recover from that sort of legacy. Whats more, line plant costs money and if the ducts are full, then there are all sorts of access problems to increase capacity. And don't forget, the likes of Talk Talk have not had to provide their own line plant – they piggyback on the existing line plant.
It's also worth point out that BT (and it's predecessors) exchanges have gone through two or three stages in being updated – manual to Strowger, Strowger to modern analogue, modern analogue to digital – whilst at the same time converting inter-exchange links to a fully digital system. All during the last 40 or so years. At the same time, telephone ownership has soared, eg one exchange that I was intimately involved with had 10,000 lines in 1960, by 1994 when I left, it was up to at least 40,000 lines. Which in turn implies a dramatic increase in local loop provision. How has all that been paid for?
And whilst when BT was created, everything – line plant & exchanges – came under one umbrella heading of BTplc, today there is Openreach, BT Residential, BT Business – all separate businesses, all forcibly created by dictat in order to foster competition.
In respect of FTTC, it is necessary to provide an additional cabinet to hold the fibre termination equipment, and since BT no longer is a Crown department, it has to obtain planning permission etc. Ditto for the optical fibres themselves. (Interestingly, when it was Post Office Telephones and hence a Crown department, they could effectively do what they wanted without consulting the local council.)
I'm not going to say that BT is perfect because clearly it isn't, but I really don't think that Talk Talk etc have really thought things through. Or more likely they are fully aware of the problems, but choose just to highlight whatever they think will help their bottom line. BT Openreach, if spun off from BTplc, will still be a company in it's own right and will have to obtain the finance for these upgrades from somewhere. Openreach doesn't charge customers, the individual telephony suppliers do that. Openreach simply charges the individual suppliers the going rate for using Openreach's lines. And let's face it, no company is going to provide fibre access if no-one is going to use it.
The bottom line is that it is going cost money, a lot of money, to provide FTTC throughout the country. Can Openreach afford it? I don't know, but I could certainly see a situation whereby Openreach ends up increasing their charges in order to fund FTTC nationally. And would Talk Talk be prepared to financially assist? I doubt it very much.
Regards,
Peter G. Shaw