Fibre to the home, a missed opportunity

Right, I'm going to whinge about something I know about for a change. Fibre to the home.  So called FTTH is a technology that BT is trialing in Ebbsfleet, Kent.  These lucky people are going to get fibre connections and might even reach speeds of 100mb/sec!  Well that's just absolutely fantastic isn't it?

Err, no it isn't!  This trial is probably a bit of a farce in my opinion.  The whole point of a new technology such as FTTH should be to make a real stride and improve the UK's broadband infrastructure.  That means symmetric connections, in other words we should have the same upload speed as download.  Before anyone leaps at me to say it would just help file sharing and so on, well it might, yes. But for those of us who work remotely using software repositories, sending digital proofs, emailing document files or web applications, we often find our ADSL lines saturated by the upload limitations of broadband.  A symmetric connection would help a great deal.

Now, BT are possibly limiting this trial deliberately to protect their leased line business which is a hugely profitable area for them.  In my opinion its still a poor service with dismal speeds and the same nonsense of household broadband.  It's also monstrously overcharged (up to ten times what our American and Asia cousins pay).

The point is this: here's an opportunity to do things properly, with a real domestic network that could be a beacon to the whole world, and instead it appears to be being run more like a protection racket.  The UK should have symmetric connections to every home, especially with fibre as there is no rational reason it should be otherwise (except perhaps profiteering!)  It is this kind profiteering that annoys, nay, angers.  Here things could make real progress, but instead we're probably taking a half step forward, to then ten steps back.

There are numerous other ways to manage the connections and to limit network abuses including bandwidth limits, graduated speeds, SLAs (for a change), bolt on offers of mail filtering/scanning.  I for one would pay BT to plug in a fibre line that has the same upload as download, running at 10mb/sec. For me, this would be a real tool and make my working life far easier.

It just makes me angry that this opportunity may be wasted, and we'll still have an antique system running slowly, ineffectually and pathetically, all thanks to a lack of vision and putting profits before a quality service.

By: Nick