BT Begins Delayed FTTP Trials

BT Openreach is to restart its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) trials at the end of this month, with the UK carrier rolling out fibre trials in two telephone exchanges initially, namely Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes, and then in Highams Park in North London.

According to ISPreview.co.uk, the pilots will see speeds of 100Mbps delivered to around 20,000 homes and businesses in each area.

These trials in Bradwell Abbey and Highams Park were first announced last year and were slated to begin in January 2010.

Six Month Delay

“We’ve learnt a great deal from our earlier technical trials of FTTP in Kesgrave, Suffolk,” a BT Openreach spokeswoman told ISPreview.co.uk. “As a result of those learnings, we have decided to push back the start of the FTTP pilots in Bradwell Abbey and Highams Park to July. It’s critical that we learn as much as we can from the pilots so that our commercial FTTP offering is introduced as smoothly as possible.”

“We have also announced two additional pilot areas for FTTP – Leytonstone and York. With these additional mixed economy pilots (FTTC and FTTP within the same exchange area) introduced towards the end of this year, the pilots will see Openreach deliver FTTP to around 40,000 premises across the four sites,” the spokeswoman said. “The pilot has commenced in Bradwell Abbey with Highams Park joining the pilot in September. The exact dates for the remaining two pilots will be confirmed by Autumn this year.”

One possible reason why BT selected Milton Keynes for the trial is that a lot of the telecom infrastructure in Milton Keynes is actually aluminium-based, not copper-based. ADSL does not work over aluminium, as it is prone to picking up all manner of interference in the form of stray electric currents.

But BT later denied this was the case.

“We chose Bradwell Abbey because it was an area that already had quite a lot of existing underground ducting which we could use to test our plan and build processes,” a BT spokesman told eWEEK Europe UK.

Brownfield Rollout

Commenting on the timeframe for these trials, the BT spokesman said that the trial would last six to nine months, with deployment slated for next March. He insisted that BT had learned a great deal from its previous FTTP trial. “We have learnt a lot about the end user customer experience, the plan and build process – installation and how best to configure the network.”

These trials are interesting however for two reasons. The first is because, unlike FTTN or FTTC (fibre to the node or street cabinet), FTTP means that a fibre optic connection is made from the telephone exchange, right through to the home or business. This theoretically will allow for the delivery of much faster access speeds than could be achieved with FTTN, but it comes at a price, as the supplier has to ensure that the fibre crosses the last mile (i.e. from the street cabinet to the actual premise), usually via telegraph pole or underground.

The second point is that BT is using brownfield sites for these trials. This means that BT is laying fibre in areas where housing and businesses already exists, and where presumably broadband infrastructure already exists, unlike greenfield (i.e. new builds such as BT’s fibre trial in Ebbsfleet, Kent.), where fibre is laid when new houses are built.

Plusnet Customers

But will BT use existing ducting, or will it be digging up or laying down new ducting for these trials? “We are trying to use as much of the existing ducting as we can, and there is an element of new ducting as well,” BT told eWEEK Europe UK.

Meanwhile it seems that BT-owned Plusnet will be the first ISP whose customers will be taking part in the FTTP trial.

In an official blog posting, the broadband provider revealed that one of its customers has become the first in the UK to go live on BT’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) project.

According to Plusnet’s Dave Tomlinson, one customer has already been signed up. “One of the first things he did was run a speedtest and this was the result: 77Mbps down, 15Mbps up.”

“Our next batch of FTTP customers are expected to go live on the trial in the next couple of weeks.”