If you recall, a few months back UK commerce minister Timms made some noise about how Britain needed fiber to the home and even organised a conference on the topic. Up til now, BT's position was that they didn't think it was worth investing, and if they were going to consider it, the business model had to be worked out before hand (d'uh!)
BT had however announced that they would fiber up new builds, which raised the question of what kind of service they would offer over that fiber. BT has announced a couple of weeks back that the problem was "solved": BT's retail arm may or may not offer service, but the fiber being managed by OpenReach, it's open game for its competitors. In Ebssfleet, Kent, that is.
As detailed in this article by the Guardian (BT bets its future on broadband 20 times faster than now) the new housing development at Ebbsfleet will not have copper services, only fibre, and Openreach expects to have 10.000 homes passed by 2010.
At face value, this is good news, and a much needed nudge towards FTTH in a country that looked like it was going to be at the back of the class in a few years time. Ultimately though, I'm not sure how this changes much, and in fact, I'm slightly worried that BT has found the ultimate stalling tactic. In the wake of this announcement, the government lifted the pressure it had put on BT since the fall as described in this article of the Financial Times (Pressure Off BT over Superfast Broadband.)
This looks to me like a nice little rigmarole. If there's one country where open access would make sense because of the enforced separation, it's the UK. Should BT have been the one to invest and is it for the government to say so? I don't know. One thing I do know is that the likelihood of the government investing or financing fiber rollout in the UK is next to zero, and that no one is in a position to compete with BT over the deployment of a new network. So effectively, with a tiny little announcement (come on, 10.000 homes in 3 years in a greenfield project?) BT has eased the pressure off and now everything's back to normal.
Incidentally, Tim Poulus has posted some interesting stuff on the prices and services made available by OpenReach to BT Retail and competitors. It's not very sexy either, it seems... You can see for yourself on Openreach's page the terms and conditions envisaged.
Edit: A titanium-grade reader points me to an editorial in the Guardian (We need vision for next generation broadband, not complacency) that suggests that not everyone is fooled by the backslapping and all-is-well attitude suggested in my above post.
