Digital Region Project may seek commercial operator to rescue it

[Paul Blade]

Looks like the Digital Region Management Team are not going for BT to run the South Yorkshire network and are going for a French company.

 

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5710-digital-region-does-not-pick-bt-as-preferred-bidder.html

 

I'm a little disappointed about this because I was thinking that if BT took over then some of the major broadband providers (I want Sky on there) would be able to use the network.

 

TBH why should they be allowed to I am with DR (Origin) and if they wanted to be able to use the network they should have put their hands in their pockets when the service was being run out not when all the hard work had been done.

Before I joined Origin I was getting speeds of 1.07 mbs (ish) download from BT, Sky and Plusnet now I'm getting 23.9

I contacted all the ISP about FTTC when I was wanting to change (May) and BT told me 12 months before I could get infinity Plusnet 18 months and Sky didn't even reply to my email

Within 5 months of the DR cabinet being put up BT put one at the side:loopy:

[Dardandec]

I would have given my right arm to get digital region. They can get it a quarter of a mile up the road but our phone cabinet isn't up there.

 

BT are in the process of installing fttc at our phone cabinet. Fibre cabinet is installed and they are in the process of powering it up and installing the fibre optic cable so I've been told.

 

Sorry DR, You were too slow, BT will have beaten you to it. A lesson to be learned there, Put it in areas that have proper slow speeds first and maybe you would have got a lot more connections, no good putting in areas that had a pretty decent speed already Good fight DR

[Paul Blade]

I contacted all the ISP about FTTC when I was wanting to change (May) and BT told me 12 months before I could get infinity Plusnet 18 months and Sky didn't even reply to my email

Within 5 months of the DR cabinet being put up BT put one at the side

 

I would have given my right arm to get digital region. They can get it a quarter of a mile up the road but our phone cabinet isn't up there.

 

BT are in the process of installing fttc at our phone cabinet. Fibre cabinet is installed and they are in the process of powering it up and installing the fibre optic cable so I've been told.

 

Sorry DR, You were too slow, BT will have beaten you to it. A lesson to be learned there, Put it in areas that have proper slow speeds first and maybe you would have got a lot more connections, no good putting in areas that had a pretty decent speed already Good fight DR

 

see post above until people went to DR in Stannington BT wasn't interested

[Dardandec]

see post above until people went to DR in Stannington BT wasn't interested

 

Yes I do realise this, my argument with DR is they put the infrastructure in a lot of already decent speed areas instead of really low speed areas. Not all I know, but would they have not faired better if they had targeted the really slow speed areas first? and marketed it a bit better maybe.

 

We have got no fibre option at the moment and my son has hounded DR to do our cabinet for about eighteen months to no avail. BT are making the effort now even though it is probably two years too late.

 

Out of principal now I will never use DR, even if they stuck a cabinet outside my front door.

 

Most of south Yorkshire isn't good enough, they should have done the lot, why discriminate against certain areas?

 

Best thing they can do with that waste of space is rip it all out and blast it as far into space as possible. Badly run, badly managed waste of space company. They obviously did no research into the areas that really needed it.

[AlexAtkin]

Out of principal now I will never use DR, even if they stuck a cabinet outside my front door.

 

Most of south Yorkshire isn't good enough, they should have done the lot, why discriminate against certain areas?

 

Best thing they can do with that waste of space is rip it all out and blast it as far into space as possible. Badly run, badly managed waste of space company. They obviously did no research into the areas that really needed it.

 

Oh don't be so immature acting like DR avoided you out of spite. They had enough money to do what they have done, no point moaning that they should have done more.

 

They wanted to do more, they planned to do more, but we ended up with an expensive fibre optic network coming online just as a recession hit. As no big ISPs came on the network then the customer ended up having to pay the connection fee, not very welcoming during a recession. Its telling that when they finally did free connection over christmas, the number of signups dramatically increased, but there is no budget to make that a permanent thing. On BTs network its the ISPs that offer free connection, by spreading it over the contract term, on DR I'm pretty sure it was DR who offered it as none of the ISPs are big enough to afford to take on such a risk.

 

My exchange was being completely ignored by BT until DR came along. In fact, most of South Yorkshire was completely off their radar, which is how DR got their funding. So if it wasn't for DR you might not have been getting fibre at all, as BT just weren't interested.

 

Yes DR dropped the ball expecting ISPs to foot the bill for advertising and so not enough customers came on board, forcing them to drop phase 2 of the project, but again that was a funding issue which is all too common with these big government/council projects that never get as much money as they need to do the job right.

 

Phase 1 was to roll out the service to the areas with the highest customer density, which makes perfect sense. Phase 2 was meant to roll out to as much as possible after that but unfortunately that depended on making more of a profit than they have so far.

 

BT can look at it from a completely different perspective as the best rollout will be directly related to where their EXISTING ducting goes and which areas they would have to pass anyway in order to link up other areas. DR had no such advantage, they were laying ducting from scratch so naturally had to pick the quickest, cheapest routes. They also will have wanted to concentrate on business areas as that is where the money would come to fund phase 2, residential is FAR less profitable.

 

You have to understand that for DR to lay fibre, they have to dig up the road/pavement. For BT to lay fibre, they drop it into their existing ducting. That is a HUGE difference in cost, planning permission and the time it takes the get the whole thing actioned. Now it may be that DR can use BT ducting now, Ofcom supposedly forced that ruling through AFTER DR had already laid their ducting, but we don't know how complicated that is and DR is in no financial position to organise any further rollouts. At least not until the new operator comes in and takes over.

Edited February 10, 2013 by AlexAtkin

[Dardandec]

Oh don't be so immature acting like DR avoided you out of spite. They had enough money to do what they have done, no point moaning that they should have done more.

 

That's easy for you to say on your 67mb broadband but there are still some area's that are lucky if they can achieve 2mb which as you know is very poor by todays standards. And I'm talking big residential area's, not out in the sticks.

 

I know area's that were already on 8mb+ through adsl 2, but still had fttc installed in them areas. Doing a little bit more research into speeds could have paid off for DR.

 

And as for BT fitting their fibre through the existing ducting, its not always as simple as that. Some of the ducting is clogged solid with crap.

[AlexAtkin]

I just KNEW you were going to throw my connection in my face, but that makes none of my points less valid now does it?

 

Its a HUGE assumption on your part that DR didn't do the research. Just because they happen to have missed some slow areas, doesn't mean they would have been practical to do. I seem to recall that one of the criteria was that they would only do cabinets which had 250+ phone lines on them. This makes sense as the more potential customers, the more likely it will pay back the cost of installing the cabinet. So while they MIGHT have missed a big residential area, if that area is split into a lot of smaller cabinets rather than a few bigger ones, that would explain it.

 

There is also the fact that during construction of the network things didn't always go according to plan and things had to be changed, areas previously intended to be included were cut back I believe. This likely is due to areas like mine where it cost more than planned due to hitting some sort of rock they needed specialist equipment to cut through during the duct work.

 

We know the original plan was to cover 98% of South Yorkshire once phase 2 was done, but phase 2 never happened due to issues getting big ISPs on board and so no advertising, fewer customers than planned.

 

Like I said, BT have a huge advantage as they can lay the fibre in their existing ductwork which is cheap, and getting big ISPs is a given seeing as its a direct migration path from ISPs existing connectivity over BTs network.

 

But my main point was that your comment that you wouldn't use DR on principle now is just silly.

 

Like I said, you still likely have DR to thank for BT doing your area at all. Although that also means you will likely never need to follow through on your threat, as there will be no motivation for DR to do areas already done by BT, when the whole point of the network was to do areas BT WEREN'T going to do. The overlap occurred due to the fact it took DR so much longer to get the network rolled out than BT, so effectively BT were able to quickly catch up and do areas that DR were expected to have exclusivity in.

Edited February 11, 2013 by AlexAtkin

[Dardandec]

I just KNEW you were going to throw my connection in my face, but that makes none of my points less valid now does it?

 

Its a HUGE assumption on your part that DR didn't do the research. Just because they happen to have missed some slow areas, doesn't mean they would have been practical to do. I seem to recall that one of the criteria was that they would only do cabinets which had 250+ phone lines on them. This makes sense as the more potential customers, the more likely it will pay back the cost of installing the cabinet. So while they MIGHT have missed a big residential area, if that area is split into a lot of smaller cabinets rather than a few bigger ones, that would explain it.

 

There is also the fact that during construction of the network things didn't always go according to plan and things had to be changed, areas previously intended to be included were cut back I believe. This likely is due to areas like mine where it cost more than planned due to hitting some sort of rock they needed specialist equipment to cut through during the duct work.

 

We know the original plan was to cover 98% of South Yorkshire once phase 2 was done, but phase 2 never happened due to issues getting big ISPs on board and so no advertising, fewer customers than planned.

 

Like I said, BT have a huge advantage as they can lay the fibre in their existing ductwork which is cheap, and getting big ISPs is a given seeing as its a direct migration path from ISPs existing connectivity over BTs network.

 

But my main point was that your comment that you wouldn't use DR on principle now is just silly.

 

Like I said, you still likely have DR to thank for BT doing your area at all. Although that also means you will likely never need to follow through on your threat, as there will be no motivation for DR to do areas already done by BT, when the whole point of the network was to do areas BT WEREN'T going to do. The overlap occurred due to the fact it took DR so much longer to get the network rolled out than BT, so effectively BT were able to quickly catch up and do areas that DR were expected to have exclusivity in.

 

First of all, you didn't know I was going to mention your connection speed, that is impossible, you guessed and you guessed well, well done

 

I still stick with my original post that they didn't do any research, or very little research into the area's that were actually crying out for a faster broadband speed. Your pulling off the intake exchange, I don't know how long DR has been enabled there but BT infinity has been enabled there for at least eighteen months to my knowledge, possibly longer, and competition has always been a good thing as it keeps prices down.

As for the fttc cabinets they can only handle so many connections at any one time so if the phone cabinets supply 1000 abodes or 30 what difference would it have made?

 

As I have already said, A fair bit of the BT ducting is useless and has to be dug up anyway. Why don't they use Virgin ducting? that was another waste of space too, discrimination again, limited areas. Oh and I don't recall saying "I" was being discriminated against, I'm sure I only mentioned "area's"

 

As I said I will not be using DR under any circumstances now, even if they stick a cabinet outside my lav, call it silly or whatever you want it isn't happening.

Edited February 12, 2013 by Dardandec

[AlexAtkin]

Actually my connection speed is EXACTLY why it would be foolish to avoid companies on principle. I'm not a big fan of Sky, but I'm not about to disconnect my satellite TV as the only person who would lose out then would be me. I'm really unimpressed with T-Mobile customer service, but I remain their customer as their price and network performance is perfectly satisfactory for me. So if you are happy to lose out "on principle" then fair enough, I still think its foolish. I also think you would change your tune if BT decided not to enable your cabinet after all and DR did, its easy to say you won't use DR now that there is zero chance of you needing to - unless you move house.

 

Anyway, DR went live on Intake about 6 months prior to Infinity I believe. However at the time DR went live there had been NO indication that BT would do Intake any time soon.

 

They were obviously afraid of losing a lot of customers as where I am most people get 2-3Mbit on ADSL and DR rolled out in the areas that Virgin Media never bothered to finish.

 

I managed to squeeze 5.5Mbit through careful choice of ISP, modem and running my line to the absolute limit.

 

As far as I am aware, Virgin Media do NOT lease out their ducting, and as I said neither did BT during the Digital Region rollout.

 

We do know however that Digital Region lease fibre off BT and Virgin Media in order to run the core network. http://www.digitalregion.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/network-schematic-v24.jpg

 

As I understand it the reason Digital Region do not target smaller cabinets (and where you could be right that they miscalculated), is that they worked on the principle that the BEST they could hope for is 10% of the customers per cabinet making the switch to a DR connection.

 

Obviously when you are working on percentages it all goes tits up if you hit a cabinet with only 30 customers on it and you need 25 to be profitable.

Edited February 12, 2013 by AlexAtkin

[Paddy]

Some more recent news regarding the future of the Digital Region project.

 

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmgeneral/deleg7/130715/130715s01.htm

 

It doesn't say if a new operator has been found yet either.