The UK’s incumbent Telco, BT, has been rolling out its faster VDSL based product for a few years now and appears to be showing signs of frugal further deployment. In BT’s initial rollout phase, some 100+ Telephone exchanges were announced for upgrade, much to the delight of residents within those footprint areas.

The rollout begins at pace, BT’s engineering division, (Openreach) working with local civils contractors starting the construction of the new VDSL cabinets, prompting the first backlash against the network upgrades from customers.

Local Authorities who approved the placement of the cabinets started to get anxious with the deployment in parts of London where residents started bombarding them with complaints over the size and placement of these boxes (like AT&T U-Verse in the States), with BT moving a small proportion of these before they were activated. Even to this day, the deployment causes issues.

But with engineering difficulties aside, over 400 exchanges have been named for upgrades, making the project look promising to people in the need of faster broadband that live out with ADSL2 exchanges and Cable franchises. What transpires with the rollout is that not every distribution cabinet within an exchange area would be upgraded with more rural connections being left with legacy equipment and no confirmation of ever being upgraded in the future.

Rural customers who had been depending on these upgrades started to become disillusioned, and small scale community fiber programs started to spring up, with costs quoted by BT for deployment being ridiculed by community associations -- many of whom are carrying out the same upgrade work for sometimes 50% less than quoted by the Telco.

Some barriers discussed openly so far have included:
• Number of active customers on a cab (too few = not enough customers to make it viable, too many = can't fit tie pairs into VDSL cabinet)
• Average length of D-side to premises from the cabinet (too many long lines = lower speed and does not meet the minimum speed guarantees BT want for Infinity
• Cost of Fibre and power connections
Planning Issues including Conservation/World Heritage areas

Further issues transpire with the sale of the product once the infrastructure is in place, with BT placing a 15Mbps "slowest speed" limit on the service, and not taking orders if they calculate a headline speed of less than 15Mbps. Examples of 14Mbps orders being rejected by BT --but then a reseller arranging a connection which turns out to be 28Mbps -- started to become a common theme in UK broadband forums. This prompted questions about the accuracy of data that BT uses to calculate these speeds, and whether BT just wanted to protect the brand and speed results that its "Infinity" product could achieve.

As with any non FTTH rollout, sceptics question when a true fiber product will appear. BT currently trialling this deployment on a small scale (but have already run into trouble). It seems that the best the UK can hope for is VDSL as the cost matrix for upgrading to FTTH from VDSL in is just not realistic.

Finally, BT’s accountability has been called into question on numerous occasion as to how serious it is taking the rollout to areas that cant achieve speeds over 2Mbps. People are also wondering if BT is simply retrofitting areas of high density and wealth to make sure they see a quick return on their initial outlay. Common sense you would think, for a company with shareholders, but not for a company that was initially created with a mandate to provide service to all in the UK without discrimination.

All in all, £2.5 billion has been spent with an estimate that 2/3 of the UK will have access to "super-fast" broadband by 2015. Those deployments will top 40Mbps (80Mbps with bonded lines in future potentially) while the primary cable provider in the UK already has 50Mbps and 100Mbps tiers and is only heading higher. Further questions about the "half baked" nature of this VDSL product and its discriminative deployment will appear, especially when works are finished and 1/3 of the population realize they have been forgotten about.

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