Ex-BT manager slams company over infrastructure investment

On Tuesday, the regulator will publish plans for creating an Openreach more independent from BT, in order to improve competitiveness within the broadband market.

A report from MPs last week warned that Openreach could be forcefully separated from BT if the company doesn’t get on top of significant underinvestment in its infrastructure.

Ofcom stopped short of recommending a separation in a report earlier in the year, but neither did it rule the option out.

BT has stringently denied it is underinvesting in its Openreach network, promising to secure ultrafast broadband speeds to 12 million homes in the next four year.

Just two million of those will be through fibre-to-the-premises, however, with the rest using a hybrid technology called G.fast, which uses the ageing copper telephony infrastructure for up to 500 metres from the customer’s home.

Professor Peter Cochrane, BT’s former CTO and head of research and development, told The Register that BT is placing too much emphasis on G.fast and not looking at the wider picture.

“An ambition of 2 million FTTP delivery is no target at all,” he said.

“It's woeful. It would be 48 years to get to all the homes [at that rate].”

Cochrane also said the estimated capability of G.fast to achieve speeds of 1Gbps - around 100 times what current ADSL broadband users might experience - appear false.

“It’s been tested in a laboratory under rather idealised conditions in the field. And some people are quoting they can do a gigabit over 200 meters - I can categorically tell you they cannot,” Cochrane said.

“What they can actually do is a gigabit over 20, possibly 30 meters. After that it just dies.”

Cochrane called the idea that the UK should be content with mediocre internet services a “very British point of view”.