Charges for ISPs during fibre trials released by Openreach

In preparation for a new pilot of fibre-to-the-home service in London, BT has announced that it will be charging ISPs to use the service and has released details of what these charges will be.

Broadband service providers would be required to pay between £175 and £255 a year for each customer line in order to access its Generic Ethernet Access Fibre to the Premises service according to the announcement posted recently on the BT Openreach website.

BT advised “This price range will apply to product bandwidth options up to and including the [100Mbps downlink and 10Mbps uplink] product with standard grade service repair response times.”

The Highams Park pilot will be the telecoms giant’s first brownfield fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment in a residential are that already has a copper-based telecoms infrastructure installed, although BT has already used the Ebbsfleet development in Kent to test a greenfield deployment of FTTH.

Up to 40 000 households will be included in the trials according to BT and although information regarding pricing has now been released following the news in August of the Highams Park pilot, the date for the beginning of the trials has yet to be released by BT.

The suggested pricing for a fully unbundled line of £86.40 per year and a cost of £15.60 a year would offer some comparison said a spokesperson for BT, although they also advised that based on the large number of services available, a comparison of Highams Park against other similar broadband product BT offered was not a straightforward matter.

The fact that broadband service providers would need to charge end-users 20 percent more than the £255 per year to make a profit this figure was thought to be quite expensive, according to a source at a rival broadband service provider.

Source – ZDNet