I really don't want to jump ship but please look at your Caps

[Bill]

... I've heard FTTC to FTTC migrations cost £100 

Yes, they do (or thereabouts).

It's a rip-off, but I suppose BT have to be good at something 

[Ardua]

I may be wrong but I do not think that BT charges anything for incoming FTTC migrations. You are just stuck with an 18 month contract.

http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/4039493-fttc-migration-aaisp-bt-complete.html?fpart=all&vc=1

There is a charge, sometimes waived by the ISP, for FTTC migrations to A N Other ISP.

[Steve]

AA quote a price of £100 , however the Openreach price list shows a fee of £50 + vat for migrations of same product/premises.

[psp83]

AA quote a price of £100 , however the Openreach price list shows a fee of £50 + vat for migrations of same product/premises.

Still expensive for a migration, which I guess is done by someone in an office somewhere and takes about 60 secs to enter.

And if a ISP wants my money that much, they would do it free or next to nothing.

[Steve]

I agree it's not really permitting choice.

[Bill]

And if a ISP wants my money that much, they would do it free or next to nothing.

IDNet also appear to charge for inward migration on FTTC:

If you already have broadband you can switch your connection to IDNet free of charge (excluding our Fibre broadband packages).

(my italic, look on the "Why choose IDNet" tab)

but I can't find what the charge is.

[psp83]

So why is normal broadband free but FTTC is not? Do they have to do a physical change or something?

[Bill]

Not to my knowledge, but I don't know for sure.

[gizmo71]

So why is normal broadband free but FTTC is not? Do they have to do a physical change or something?

Isn't there a fairly low limit on the number of connections supported by the big cabinets? Whereas normal ADSL only requires special equipment at the exchange so it's much easier to provision lots of services across everyone using the exchange, rather than risk running out of DSLAM ports in whatever big cabinet is next to your normal one and have to move the line to another cabinet.

[psp83]

Isn't there a fairly low limit on the number of connections supported by the big cabinets? Whereas normal ADSL only requires special equipment at the exchange so it's much easier to provision lots of services across everyone using the exchange, rather than risk running out of DSLAM ports in whatever big cabinet is next to your normal one and have to move the line to another cabinet.

That shouldn't really count if you're already a FTTC customer as you've already got a port. That will only count towards new FTTC connections.

Surely its only a database change to say who your line connects to ?

[Technical Ben]

Lots of companies charge around £25-£125 to send a letter/process a request these days... because they can. But the finders pointed at BT/Openworld here, not IDNet IMO.

[gizmo71]

That shouldn't really count if you're already a FTTC customer as you've already got a port. That will only count towards new FTTC connections.

Surely its only a database change to say who your line connects to ?

Good point. Mind you, if BT are anything like where I work it takes half a dozen people to approve, execute and verify a one row change in a production database...

[Ardua]

the Openreach price list shows a fee of £50 + vat for migrations of same product/premises.

Agreed, but many ISPs are already discounting this cost to attract inward business. That said, I am not sure that the migration charge would feature that highly in my list of criteria when choosing an ISP. If FTTC follows the same pattern as ADSL, then I suspect there will come a time when this charge falls by the wayside; particularly, when cheaper VSDL2 router/modems flood the market.

[pctech]

I maybe wrong but I thought that, just as with ADSL migrations a VDSL2 migration simply involves rerouting the connection from the losing ISP to the gaining ISP.

[mervl]

Perhaps we forget that telecomms (and other utilities in the UK) are commercial operations since privatisation (it was the point after all, and many of us made an easy profit at the time), subject to those prices which are set by the regulator, under legislative rules. So prices are what the market will bear. And where do we think BT gets the millions it is investing, including the match-funding for BDUK (clue: it doesn't own a money printing press or even any of the fabled money-trees) - from the consumers; and even investors want a return (or I just hope that none of you expect a pension or even to get paid sometime this month). Where are these investors, by the way: the government, President Obama and the EU would like to hear from you?

The tenner or so a month for line rental, and smaller portion of broadband subs, that goes to the ring-fenced OpenReach goes how far, exactly: well I don't think I'd get too much as a customer of any of you for a tenner - but I'd love to be proved wrong!? So BT makes money where it can, not least in the (unregulated) Wholesale charges - which constrains IDNet's room for maneouvre. And don't forget, as always, the hogs are subsidised by the (majority) with more modest demands, so the bigger the customer base the greater the subsidy available. Sometimes it might just help to try and look at the bigger picture.

I know that we all like to think we are our own little island  existing in our own little bubble at the centre of the universe revolving around us, like the advertisers constantly tell us; but sorry, we aren't. We're minnows in a big pond, and our tantrums don't matter one jot. We'll learn when (rather, if) we grow up.

But hey if we're really so knowledgeable and convinced, then why not set up an ISP - how hard can it be? 

[Rik]

How long have you got?  Nicely put.

[Simon]

Indeed. 

[pctech]

But hey if we're really so knowledgeable and convinced, then why not set up an ISP - how hard can it be? 

I did actually look into this myself some time ago and the cost of renting what were then known as Centrals from BT (backhaul from the 20CN) gave me nightmares and then there was the cost of the routers to terminate them, housing the routers in a data centre.......  it takes some serious capital to even kick off the process of building a network, which for the sort of service I'd want, would want to provide and most of the type of customers IDNet attracts would want, is the only way to do it properly rather than reselling a white label product.

As for the spirited defence of poor poor BT, they are not as poor as you may think.

[Rik]

Not poor, but they have huge costs as well as charges. The problem is that they have shareholders but we wouldn't want to go back to them being State-run.

[andrue]

What I've heard about Be intrigues me a bit. Apparently most of their exchanges are daisy chained and at least in the early days used BT's BES or WES service for the chain. So basically just a series of DSLAMs linked together with Ethernet cable(*). Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about

https://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/ethernetservices/backhaulextensionservices/bes.do

But our office is currently working with the landlord to have fibre installed to our site and it's scary how complicated that's becoming. In theory it's easy as well:

• Get BT to blow fibre down the existing ducting.
• Stick a head-end node in the landlord's garage.
• Run Cat5 to all the offices.

So far it's taken four months and we're still not there yet. The current stumbling block appears to be the ISP. We wanted the landlord to sign up then sub-rent capacity to us. He doesn't want to do that. That means we all have to find an ISP for ourselves. Our complication on that is that our corporate IT department (who already run an international WAN) say that if we get fibre we ought to go MPLS but that's expensive and we're not sure the proposed setup will support it.

It's madness, I tells ya, madness.


(*)Yeah, virtual Ethernet cable

[Tacitus]

Have you had a look at one of the community BB suppliers such as these?  http://www.gigaclear.com/

I know they're aimed at domestic users in rural locations but effectively you *are* a community and, I believe you are in a rural or semi-rural situation so they might be interested.

[andrue]

Have you had a look at one of the community BB suppliers such as these?  http://www.gigaclear.com/

I know they're aimed at domestic users in rural locations but effectively you *are* a community and, I believe you are in a rural or semi-rural situation so they might be interested.

We haven't looked at one of those but although we're semi-rural it's only by about a mile and our exchange has been FTTC enabled. The physical side seems easy and quite cheap (apparently zero cost for blowing the fibre down existing ducting). It's actually finding someone to carry the data that's a bit of a pain at the moment :-/

The landlord is not very IT savvy either the solution he chooses depends to an extent on what we decide so there's a chicken-or-egg problem as well.

[pctech]

Not poor, but they have huge costs as well as charges. The problem is that they have shareholders but we wouldn't want to go back to them being State-run.

I'd agree on that but there is the alternative I'd mentioned before, that is Openreach being mutually owned by all the telcos/ISPs.

Openreach will never be truly independent until it is decoupled from BT Group.

[Rik]

I agree, but who pays BT for it?

[mervl]

I'd agree on that but there is the alternative I'd mentioned before, that is Openreach being mutually owned by all the telcos/ISPs.

And you really think that would work, in the light perhaps of the experience of the degree of co-operation exhibited between the mobile telcos on their roll-outs?