Openreach (BT) has this week launched a new “Advanced Provision Trial” for their UK gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP products, which so far as we can tell appears to be the next step on the operator’s path toward development of a new FTTP for business product.
Openreach have been slowly working toward the development of a new ‘FTTP For Business’ (aka – FTTP Advanced) product that could harness XGS-PON technology and may eventually even offer symmetric speeds (existing products are all asymmetric, with slower uploads due in part to the limits of their current GPON infrastructure). Such products would obviously cost more than their consumer-focused plans and attach a higher priority rate for data etc.
The latest development on this front appears to be the announcement of a new FTTP Advanced Provision Trial. Sadly, the public briefing doesn’t contain anything to help explain what this is, although we’ve today been able to uncover a few more details.
By the sounds of it the Advanced Provision Trial will help Openreach to test some new and more complex installation scenarios on business and public sector sites, which will adopt some of the same things that you might normally expect to see from an Ethernet (EAD) install rather than FTTP.
For example, at present a regular FTTP installation comes with two options – Standard and Premium. One of the differences here is that a Standard install will see Openreach place the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) on your wall, usually within 10 metres from where the fibre enters your building (house etc.). A Premium installation extends this to 30m, but the new Advanced trial can do up to 100m (subject to survey).