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BT broadband hopefuls face long delay
By Ian Lynch [10-09-2002]
Registered ADSL customers must wait till next year
Only a handful of the 71,000 people who have registered an interest in ADSL as part of BT's registration scheme are likely to get high-speed internet access before Christmas.
Of the thousands of BT local telephone exchanges currently lacking broadband internet capabilities, just a few are set to be upgraded before the end of the year.

BT began its registration scheme in July. It required between 200 and 700 users to state in advance that they want broadband before it would agree to invest in their area.

The scheme covers 595 exchanges, with another 231 due to be added at a later date. But only five exchanges look likely to get broadband from the 71,000 registrations taken.

Of the lucky few, those around Todmorden in West Yorkshire will be celebrating as they have met the trigger level and BT is moving to the next stage of the conversion process.

Providing that three-quarters of those registered confirm their interest to their internet service provider within six weeks, the telco will begin the three-month conversion process to broadband.

Registrations at exchanges in Merthyr Tydfil, Inverness, Penn in Buckinghamshire, Bishop's Waltham in Hampshire and Irby on the Wirral are also close to meeting BT's demands. About 20 others are nearly half-way to reaching their trigger target.

"We expect that some of these will be on before Christmas," a BT spokesman told vnunet.com.

The telco argues that the threshold scheme is necessary because the conversion costs are too expensive for a nationwide programme.

But independent experts have said that BT actually requires as few as 50 customers per exchange in order to justify the investment.

David Cleevely, chairman at analyst organisation Analysys, and the government's chief independent advisor on broadband, commented that the levels showed that BT's "appetite for risk is rather small".

The BT spokesman insisted that the telco is keen to promote the roll-out, maintaining that 73 per cent of all internet users were already covered and that the figure would increase to around 85 per cent once all the trigger levels were met.

"We have just begun a nationwide advertising campaign and hope to see some big steps in registrations," he said.

Britain suffers by comparison with other developed countries in the roll-out of broadband internet.

With the failure of the local loop unbundling process and lack of cheap alternatives in the UK, the country is largely reliant on BT and the cable companies to install the necessary infrastructure.

BT has set a target of one million ADSL connections by summer 2003. Germany's Deutsche Telekom, in contrast, had signed up two million customers by December 2001.



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