As you may imagine, there's been a lot of commentary on BT's announcement yesterday. Many seem to think it's rather less glorious than BT would like it to be and the oscar for the best one-liner goes to Karl Bode in DSL Reports (British Telecom Announces Fiber to the Press Release) who says:
"Of course these half-hearted approaches to network upgrades are in order to please nervous investors, who start fidgeting like children in church when presented with the huge upfront costs of true FTTH (though they have the luxury of bailing when the company is no longer competitive). So companies instead embrace "fiber to the press release," a blend of fiber and pure, refined marketing that allows them to pretend they offer last mile fiber."
It seems very clear to me that this announcement is a chess move first and foremost. A way for BT to say to government and regulator "this may not be that revolutionary, but think what we could do with the right incentives..." That should not however make us disregard the fact that something is happening in Albion, and while this something may be dissapointing to many who were hoping for better, it is better... than nothing.
There was, however, another very interesting (and related) piece of news yesterday which got rather less coverage but shows the directions that this tug o' war is taking (assuming a tug o' war can take a direction, but hey, I'm French, I'm entitled to mangle English expressions!)
PCPro published a brief article entitled BT wants access to Virgin's cable network. Essentially this is based on a one-line comment, presumably at a press conference, where BT was asked if the regulatory regime they were seeking included getting access to Virgin's cable network at a wholesale level.
"We think, as a principle, that would be worth extending. It's about applying that principle across the board."
was BT's answer. Remember my musings about the regulatory regime of cable a few weeks back (The Cable Exception.) It's happening rather sooner than I anticipated, but if Virgin insists they're selling fiber and not cable, this only makes sense I'm not actually sure BT would make use of that access, at least in the early phases, and it might have adverse effects on Openreach's business if Virgin was to become an agressive wholesaler, but this is clearly part of a push to get the regulator to consider the cable as an equivalent access network burdened with the same regulatory constraints.
