[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

As noted previously the whole point of BT's statement is that they are allowing access to their ducts.

Yes, that's very generous of BT. What % of BT Open Reach ducts actually go the home?

As mentioned the vast majority of BTs Access Network is still overhead. Series of poles fed by large count twisted pair copper cables.

The costs or otherwise of building BT's network aren't relevant to the discussion. BT's network, ducts, poles and pairs included, was bought and paid for by the private sector.

Yes, well the company was floated so yes you are correct in a manner of speaking, but the private sector never made the initial investment. The Public made the initial investment and took the resultant hit for any subsequent depreciation. Floating a formally public company on the stock market is not the same as say NTL buying out CWC. It's not an apples v apples comparison.

A figure for full FTTP build assuming a new civils build with the exemption of being able to use BT's ducts which you appear to consider so pants would appear to disagree with your views on this somewhat.

what figure?

That ntl and Telewest massively overpaid for their cable assets when they were greedily eating up the UK cable market doesn't mean that the networks themselves were as expensive to build as their prices may suggest.

NTL/Telewest paid what the market value for how those assets were valued at the time, the telecoms crash and the quick depreciation of new technology makes the deals look unattractive in hindsight, however if they had not been bought by NTL or Telewest they would have been bought by somebody else. The fact that NTL and Telewest survived is proof that the decision to acquire those companies was the right one.

For the price ntl paid for ex-CWC CoCo for example, 8.2bn which with inflation would be over 9 now, it's believed over a third of the population of the UK, more than the total coverage of ntl including CWC CoCo, could have a full FTTP build using only BT ducting as far as existing build goes.

I don't see the point of the comparison. What are you suggesting? that BT should be given £8.2b? that we would have been better off without cable networks and that we should have stuck to one incumbent supplier and instead of all that wasted money it may have found it way to BT to improve their network?

Has a full audit been done of the VM access ducting? Can you say with any confidence what condition it is in compared with the BT ducting? It may be 20 years newer doesn't mean that there's magically more capacity there.

True, but my point is that at least I know that all properties serviced by VM have an access point direct into the U/G access network. BT doesn't

Can't have it both ways, either it's this immeasurably superior ducting with loads of space compared to BT's network or it's full and wouldn't be economic to sell.

Which is it going to be?

Superior ducting, but not always with lots of space, but with an access point to the boundary of all serviced properties, which may be needed for future expansion so uneconmical to sell