Quote:
Originally Posted by Horizon
....but they're not sharing poles in this trial. And as far as I know, cable deployments, including using shared poles are in large towns and cities in the States. There is no cable in small towns, although an American small town is "slightly" larger than one of ours.
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No cable in small towns? Cable TV is more watched in the US than OTA or satellite, nearly 60% of US homes take cable, and its' availability is over 90% One big reason for this coverage is the sharing of utility poles.
The maths is a bit different for Virgin compared with BT. BT get paid whether they upgrade people or not, Virgin covering a new area is a whole new revenue stream and using power company poles throughout massively reduces cost of rollout. In some ways rural areas with poor levels of competition are an even better market for Virgin than urban ones where they compete with Telefonica, Sky, etc and could give a potentially higher uptake.
Certainly some rural areas are quite persuasive for upgrades as the cost per home of upgrades to FTTP are comparable to London. Getting rid of many of those costs by using utility poles is another bonus. Nice clusters of homes close together with minimal civils required to get to them.