With all the talk of BT’s Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) service, and the incorrect advertising of providing homes and businesses with ‘fibre internet’, their actual true Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) product seems to have gone under the radar. While there have been reports of delivering it to new build housing developments and so forth it now seems they are actively rolling out across the country to existing households. This is the exciting part as while it makes sense to install fibre into new homes, the question of replacing copper right up to the home has been a difficult one to justify.
As part of our service exchange platform we have to talk to a number of BTs systems and to enable some of the functionality we have to actively place test circuits to demonstrate the system works end to end. So with the recent FTTP service we identified two members of our technical team who could get the service at their homes (100 Mb/s down and 40 Mb/s up) and proceeded to place some orders. What was most fascinating about these installs was the use of fibre over poles to deliver the cable to the homes. So instead of digging up the drive and installing the fibre, as you would expect, it is suspended from the local BT pole to the side of the home and then through the wall.
On the wall on the inside sits the BT termination router and backup battery which all looks very well thought out and professional – if a little more obvious than the BT master socket it replaces. Obviously it would have been nice to work straight away but with the installs failing it looks like there are still a number of bugs to iron out with the physical installation process. But it all looks very promising and a product I am sure will be very successful if widely rolled out. From a personal perspective I will be interested to see what support issues are raised and how external factors, such as the UK weather, will impact the quality of the service.
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