BT – Page 10 – Digital-Lifestyles

UK LLU – OTA Say, “Could do Better”

OTA: Local Loop Unbundling Lagging Behind The Independent Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator (OTA) has issued an update on their progress of ‘local loop unbundling’ (LLU – the process of opening BT’s exchanges to competitors).

The speed of unbundling, or in this case lack of it has a direct effect on the range of competitive broadband providers, and therefore the speed of services that can be provided and their cost.

To date, some 31,000 lines have been unbundled, but the OTA update reads: “Good. But could do better.”

There are reports of variable performance in some operational areas, with performance lagging behind the OTA Key Performance Indicator, ‘Right First Time’. This snappily monikered indicator checks to see if services are being delivered in time to meet customers’ expectations.

The OTA has set a target of 75% with actual delivery being variable at 50-60%. This target rises to 85% in the near future.

The number of lines unbundled has grown from 12,000 in May 2004 to 31,000 lines unbundled by 31 January 2005.

Once again, this falls behind the OTA target, which had specified 50,000 unbundled lines by February 2005.

The Telecoms Adjudicator Scheme is successfully underway, with 14 companies signed up, and encouraging noises about investment commitment, have been heard.

LLU price reductions were implemented from 1 January 2005, and there are more price reductions on the horizon.

Despite all this, LLU operators continue to experience operational problems and variable delivery performance isn’t doing wonders for the operators’ marketing plans.

The Adjudicator’s update tells it like it is: as the orders keep rolling in, operational performance is the key to success for LLU.

Independent Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator
Ofcomwatch comments on it.

Ofcom Strategic Review of Telecommunications Gets UK Parliament Inquiry

The UK House of Commons launched an inquiry into Ofcom’s Strategic Review of Telecommunications (SRT) yesterday.

Ofcom, the uber-regulator that among other things, oversees telecoms in the UK, started its SRT in January 2004. It was long overdue in the eyes of many, as it was the first comprehensive strategic review of the UK telecommunications sector for 13 years.

Now the UK House of Commons, Trade and Industry Committee will be looking into the workings and results of the SRT, in particular how it relates to the “extensiveness and competitiveness” of broadband in the UK.

The SRT is divided in to three phases; Current position and prospects for the telecommunications sector; Options for Ofcom’s strategic approach to telecommunications regulation; and Proposals; the first phase was published at the end of April.

Ofcom identified two key problems in Phase One; an unstable market structure in fixed telecoms, dominated by BT and with alternative providers that are, in the main, fragmented and of limited scale; BT’s control of the UK-wide access network hadn’t been addressed to date. They then posed some questions; primarily about the future of BT.

Phase Two was published in November 04 and used some relatively strong language (pretty diplomatic in the normal, non-Quango world), which we summarised as “Ofcom to BT: Equivalence or else”. It’s still open for public consultation until 3 February 2005.

Yesterdays announcement from the Trade and Industry Committee, said in the light of the Committee’s Report on the UK Broadband Market, the inquiry will be looking into OfCom’s STR process to date, the interim conclusions reached in the Phase Two document, and the direction of the remainder of the Review. They’ll be paying particular attention how it relates to the competitiveness of the broadband market in the UK, including local loop unbundling, and the “functional separation of British Telecom”.

A spokeperson at OfCom told us that they “had already briefed the Committee” and “welcomed their interest” in the SRT. When we asked about the previously expected Spring delivery of SRT Phase 3, we were told that they “still planned” to meet it. Frankly they were playing their cards pretty close to their chest.

We called the office of the Committee, but given the 21 enquiries they have on currently, no one was available for comment at the time of publishing the story.

If you have any view on the area covered by the Committee, they’re asking for written evidence on these or any other related issues by Friday 18 February 2005 via email ([email protected]). If you do write please CC ([email protected]) us in, we’d be interested in see the issues raised.

Alerted by OfcomWatch
Trade and Industry Select Committee
Ofcom – Strategic Review of Telecommunications

BT Wholesales 4m ADSL Connections

BT has, through its arrangement with over 150 broadband providers, delivery four million ADSL connections in the UK. This figure also includes connections sold directly to the public by BT Retail.

BT say they are connecting a new customer every 10 seconds, equating to an average of nearly 60,000 new connections each week.

The last million milestone was only back in August 2004 when three million connections were announced. A million new connections in one quarter is pretty good.

Currently there isn’t really any competition for BT Wholesale, although some companies are starting to make early moves with specialist services like UK Online.

We see this as another in the long running back and forth between BT and OFCOM. BT tells the press “No BT would equal No Broadband” (as Christopher Bland did to the Telegraph), OFCOM tells them to trim their prices. Is their any co-incidence that BT issued this news on the heals of OFCOM ordering BT to cut the cost of third party access to the customer, opening the market for strong competition for BT Wholesale?. As the Guardian commented

At the moment BT is the gatekeeper to all but 16,000 of the UK’s 25m phone lines, and charges for access to them. The telecoms operator suffered a blow six months ago when it was forced to lower the prices it charges for access to its network. Ofcom is aiming to get a system in place next year that will see 1 million lines unbundled a year.

Will BT continue to be so strong with meaningful competition?

BT And Blueprint Jointly Develop Innovative Music Distribution Service

In yet another move in the legitimate digital music market, BT and Blueprint have jointly developed a new service based on Blueprint’s Open Royalty Gateway (ORG) and Song Centre software that allows copyright holders to take more control of their material.

The new service for hosting, managing and distributing music and related content online, promises to accelerate the growth of the market by addressing key problems hampering the development of online music businesses, such as time to market, copyright protection, capital expenditure in IT and networking technologies, control of rights and the margin structure of the present models.

BT brings to the table IT, networking and data storage knowledge, while Blueprint offers experience in media management software and music industry relationships. Blueprint will provide the software framework and industry interface, with BT utilising its digital content hosting platform and international network to deliver a global reach.

The solution enables rights holders – artists, writers, publishers and record companies – to host their songs, videos, ringtones and other digital media files while having a direct commercial relationships with retailers. Content can be delivered directly to any number of media-enabled devices, including PCs, digital audio players and mobile phones. Of course, online-only distribution also dramatically reduces the time it takes to get digital files to market, but the system has to be successful in managing rights and digital licences, reporting royalties and sales to rights holders, and offering a wide variety of digital media to consumers using variable pricing structures.

An interesting feature of ORG is that it allows rights holders to actively manage their content, including setting business rules for pricing and location, electronic contract creation, sales tracking and royalty reporting. In addition to handling ‘major label’ music content, ORG allows independent labels and artists, many of whom control their own rights, to encode, package and upload their content to the service and then manage contracts. Blueprint will also work with retailers, letting them mix and match content to create their own offers and campaigns through a service called Song Centre.

On the other hand, the service could, however, let artists or smaller labels bypass the majors and sell their music directly to retailers or consumers. Referral and reward programmes, using viral recommendation, also means that consumers can earn back the cost of the music they purchase, by rewarding them with a commission each time one of their friends buys recommended content.
The service has already been used by EMI for Robbie Williams’ recent No.1 hit single ‘Radio’ with Australia and New Zealand’s leading music retailers, Sanity and Sounds. Audio, video, visual and mobile content was bundled together for sale, and linked into a competition utilising Blueprint’s referral and reward technology to drive additional opportunities to win prizes. The service is now powering the global Robbie Williams ‘Greatest Hits’ digital download store.

Blueprint
BT

Ofcom to BT: Equivalence or else

After a long period of deliberation Ofcom, the UK regulator, has come to its conclusion on the Strategic Review of Telecommunications Phase 2 (SRT 2 to those in the know). It won’t be forcing the split of BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

For a very long time, most companies in the UK telecoms market have bemoaned BT Retail getting a better deal from BT Wholesale (they own the network) than they were able to achieve. In the competitor’s eyes, the market hasn’t been balanced. Many felt that BT has been expert in ‘playing’ the regulator, especially Ofcom’s previous rendition, OfTel – only making changes just before they were forced.

In SRT 2 Ofcom investigated three options, Full deregulation; Enterprise Act investigation; BT to deliver real equality of access. They’ve come down on the side of the latter, in their words

“Ofcom calls on BT to provide prompt and clear proposals which will achieve these behavioural changes and bring about the level of confidence required.”

and if equality isn’t achieved, they threaten to use the second; an investigation into the market under the Enterprise Act 2002, with the potential for a subsequent referral to the Competition Commission.

In theory, when equal access to the network is given, the need for Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) to provide competing broadband services will be reduced.

When we spoke to Video Networks, the company behind the London-based IP VOD-services, they said the news today would “not impact their LLU plans”. EasyNet, a significant unbundler, didn’t get back to us before we went to press.

The SRT 2 is now open for public consultation until 3 February 2005.

It would appear that the threats from Christopher Bland, Chair of BT, in the Telegraph at the weekend that “No BT would equal No Broadband” were unnecessary.
Update: OfcomWatch comment

BT Offer Public WiFi for £1/month

It’s just bargain after bargain, as companies keep pushing out the barriers to attract new customers or hang on to existing ones, using every technological and communications innovation available. Now BT is offering its new and existing, business and consumer broadband customers, public wireless broadband for just £1 a month. Remember that BT already have a Bluephone in the offing – a mobile phone that will provide cheap Web-based phone calls from Wi-Fi hot spots anywhere in the world.

The service is called BT Openzone and there are two introductory discount deals of £1 per month for up to 500 minutes available to BT Business Broadband customers and BT Broadband and BT Yahoo! 500 minutes is only eight hours a month though, and this may not be enough for some people. It is offered to BT customers, who sign up before December 31, 2004. After the first three months, customers can continue using the exact same service for a further 12 months for £5 a month.

Aimed at people on the move who need to keep in touch, customers can log on to BT Openzone with their Wi-Fi enabled laptop or PDA when within range of over 7,000 hotspot locations across the UK, including hotels, airports, railway stations and coffee shops. With cable companies, mobile operators and VoIP providers always offering trendy alternatives, Telcos have to keep going back to the drawing board.

But (she asked, scratching her head), why would you bother paying £5 or even £1 per month if all you have to do is hawk your laptop down to the nearest café, and get the whole lot for free, plus a really well-made cup of coffee?

Thousands of BT Openzone hotspots can be found in the UK and Republic of Ireland, in motorway service stations, airports, conference centres, hotels and cafés. Also, a Wi-Fi roaming agreement with BT Openzone, has increased the number of T-Mobile UK hotspots to 1,900, and customers of BT Openzone will now also have access to T-Mobile’s 600 UK Wi-Fi hotspots, as well as thousands more across Europe and the US. Now all we have to worry about is wireless security!

BT Group plc

BT helps small businesses join the VoIP revolution

BT has seen its fixed-line base erode steadily over the past few years, while tariffs have fallen, making it hard for it to increase revenue. But it looks like BT is grabbing the nettle rather than shying away from it.

That means sniffing around for new market opportunities in a rapidly changing technological landscape. And in the case of BT, instigating the first Internet phone service specifically for UK SMEs, and launching next year the Bluephone, which will allow you to make VoIP, mobile or landline calls from the same handset.

Small businesses across the UK now have access to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), with the launch of BT Business Broadband Voice. Subscribers simply plug BT’s Broadband Voice box into their high-speed Internet connection and then use a standard telephone handset to make calls, rather than having to connect via a computer. This means that Internet calls can be made from anywhere that has a broadband connection, enabling employees to keep the same number, whether they’re working from the office or remotely.

It can’t be easy for a lumbering giant having nimble little gnat-like competitors such as Carphone Warehouse and Centrica’s OneTel snapping at it haunches, especially if you lost about half a million fixed-line customers during the July-to-September quarter to some of those competitors. Only last week, Ofcom said that Carphone Warehouse and Centrica’s OneTel, had expanded their customer base to 4.2 million at the end of September from 3.7 million at the end of June.

BT’s proposed Bluephone acts like a mobile, but it has better reception, better voice quality and is cheaper to use than a mobile, because it operates over BTs fixed line network. When you use it near your home or office, the call is routed using your landline connection, if you are out and about it will use the mobile network, and if you are within a Wi-Fi hotspot it will automatically use VoIP to route the call.

Ofcom reported the number of UK broadband connections passed the 5 million point during September, with around 50,000 new subscriptions added every week. So, while fixed voice telecoms use continues to decline slowly, broadband uptake continues apace, which might start to mean more of a shift rather than a loss in business for telcos who grasp the nettle.

BT Broadbandvoice.

BT Bars Scam Diallers… For Now

BT has responded to the growing problem of rogue telephone diallers by blocking 1,000 premium rate numbers used by the downloaded applets.

Diallers are generally installed without a computer users knowledge, often through a website or as part of an application or virus. The dialler then replaces the users’ ISP details and instead access the internet using an expensive premium rate number. BT admit that they have dealt with 45,000 complaints from subscribers who have fallen victim to this scam, with another 9,000 cases pending.

With the offending numbers blocked, diallers will not be able to get through – for the time being. This is only a temporary fix – new diallers are released almost daily and I’m sure it might take somewhere in the region of about a week for someone to come up with a dialler that can check a regularly updated table of numbers that haven’t been blocked yet. Putting BT and its subscribers back where they started.

Realistically, the only way round this is for concerned subscribers to block access to all premium-rate numbers – which can be inconvenient. BT report that some 1.5 million customers currently use this approach, and the company provides premium-rate number blocking as a free service.

Gavin Patterson, BT’s group managing director for consumer and venture business said in a statement: “We have taken the decision to block numbers suspected of being associated with diallers as soon as we are alerted to a problem. We have offered free premium rate barring to all customers, and a removable bar for premium rate and international calls for UK£1.75 (€2.54)a month. We have made it clear that we are not the ones profiteering from people’s misfortune. In fact, we will continue to forego our share of the call revenue generated by these disputed calls.

“We will be emailing all of our dial-up customers again to give them advice on how to avoid falling victim to a dialler, because customers need to take action as well to protect themselves, as we believe many cases aren’t fraud but are due to a lack of awareness from customers. In fact, we are seeing that many cases are cleared up when we explain where these charges have come from, which underlines our view that there needs to be greater awareness of how these services operate.”

BT comment on diallers

BT Doubles Bandwidth for Business Customers; Blair Promises Broadband UK 2008

BT has announced today that it will be doubling the speed of its customers’ Business Broadband Network connections, at no extra cost. Customers on the 512k and 1 meg pipes will be upgraded to Network 1000 and 2000 automatically.

Customers on the 2 meg service won’t be getting ablistering 4 meg however – instead they’ll see a UK£30 (€44) reduction in their monthly line rental.

Duncan Ingram, BT Retail’s managing director of Broadband and Internet Services commented: “High bandwidth is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for businesses. Companies now need to have more than one computer attached to a network connection and that’s exactly what our Network products are designed for. Doubling bandwidth, whilst not increasing price, is part of our continuing drive to give our business customers the tools they need to really harness broadband, giving them a clear advantage over competitors and enabling them to punch well above their weight. Not only does it make communication easier, but also enables small businesses to have access to the same applications and services that have traditionally only been open to much larger enterprises.”

Speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton, the UK PM Tony Blair promised a broadband Britain by 2008, if the country voted Labour: “Our country and its people prospering in the knowledge economy. Increasing by £1bn the investment in science, boosting support to small businesses and ending the digital divide by bringing broadband technology to every home in Britain that wants it by 2008.”

Broadband is part of a package of ten items that Blair promises as part of a Labour third term. Included amongst them are ID cards and the electronic registration of everyone who passes the UK’s borders.

Given that it’s not actually the UK government who will be doing the connecting, it’s a bit of a cheeky promise.

Since BT have already estimated that 99.6% of households will be broadband accessible by July 2005, is Tony saying that voting Labour will delay the whole process by three years?

BT double bandwidth

BT Drops the Cost of Local Loop Unbundling

For a very long time UK broadband providers have claimed that BT have had an obvious lack of enthusiasm for letting them in to telephone exchanges to install their own equipment, to offer services to rival BT’s. Known in the trade as local loop unbundling (LLU), BT’s rivals see it as the only profitable way to provide broadband and high-speed services, so they don’t have to pay BT for each customer, as they do if BT equipment is used.

Following on from continuous pressure from Ofcom, the UK super-regulator, and LLU price reductions announced in May, BT has now cut the cost further.. . They put this down to their investment in new automated processes. From now the cost of a shared LLU line is 62% less than it was in June of this year, the connection charge is now standing at £37 (~$64, ~€52) while the annual rental is £27.12 (~$48, ~€36). It looks like BT might be on a roll and if it continues, prices may be reduced by up to 70% by the end of the year.

Ofcom already indicated its enthusiasm for LLU to play a greater role in stimulating competition in the wholesale broadband sector. Last April its chief executive, Stephen Carter, hinted that Ofcom would be proactive in making LLU more attractive to rival operators.

In real terms, cutting the cost of LLU will encourage the deployment of more 3rd party equipment in BT’s exchanges, giving more choice to UK customers. As if to prove how serious they are about it, BT is appointing an LLU director of ceremonies. NTL and Cable & Wireless (Bulldog) have already announced multi-million-pound plans to invest in LLU in the UK, and they must be chomping at the bit to install their kit in BT exchanges and get on with the business of offering a service to their customers.

The UK is now a respectable 8th in the list of DSL countries, according to the DSL Forum. And as a member of the European Union, it is in the number one DSL region with more than 23 million subscribers. With lower prices bringing the UK more in line with its European counterparts, and higher speeds, customers should notice improvements as the LLU market in the UK is finally ignited.

DSL Forum

Ofcom