So what is copper good for anyway? - xDSL? - never! - this is the biggest joke of the century (bearing in mind there are still 99 years left to find a bigger one). Cast your eyes back to Totaltele on Wednesday, 27 June, 2001 in which the following article was published: "ADSL business model flawed - BT". The article states: i) The head of British Telecom's ADSL service offering, BTOpenworld says the business model for delivering high-speed Internet access over copper cables doesn't work; ii) it went on to say that BT has failed to generate any advertising or e-commerce revenue to supplement its ADSL service, currently priced to just cover the £40 in cost of equipment and delivery of the services to home users. Andy Green went on to say that BT is now considering raising the price of its ADSL offering, together with the introduction of alternative technologies such as satellite. Moreover, this division of BT lost £227 million last year. Does this not send out a very loud signal to the market? If the incumbent can't make ADSL pay as a viable product over its own copper Local Loop (that has already paid for itself over the past 40-50 years) - who the heck can? If it were not for the fact that I have a NTL Cable Modem running at 512kBit/s, which costs me a flat fee of £20 per month, there is no way I would be sitting here on the TT Forum web site typing this lot in over a BT dial-up link clocking up 3-4p/minute. I will not even bother to make a comparison between my cable modem service and BT's ADSL, except to say I would not pay BT £40 per month for an ADSL service delivered over a cranky old pair of copper wires when I can get an equivalent service for half the price delivered over a brand new digital fibre network, with a co-ax cable drop to my house delivering more megabit/s to my doorstep than I can shake a stick at. Anyone thinking of buying BT's copper network must be out of their mind. Not only is copper wire a 150 year-old technology, originally designed to carry 4.0 Khz analogue voice signals, it also suffers badly from variable transmission characteristics, dependent on weather conditions, electromagnetic interference and the quality of buried crimp joints along the cable between the CO and the customer. What is even worse, a lot of it is more than 40 years old and some of it still runs on overhead copper feeds strung from poles. And, customers more than 1km from the CO (telephone exchange) will be lucky to get ADSL working at 512kBit/s. There is nothing wrong with the different varieties of DSL technology - the problem lays in the copper wire infrastructure of the Local Loop. The only viable solution to the broadband access conundrum is FTT'X' and the sooner someone bites the bullet and gets on with making the investment - the better. That £8 billion offered by Earthlease to BT could be put to far better use. If re-directed to new wired community projects, it would go a long way to getting 'real' broadband services to a majority of UK homes & businesses over a brand new fibre network. At about £1,000 per drop, my simple math tells me that £8 billion could get 'real' broadband (i.e. 10-100 megabits per second) to 8 million UK homes & businesses.
Source:
Brian Powell, bpowell@arran.prestel.co.uk
Managing Consultant, U.K., Arran Associated Ltd. |
