January 2007
In this issue we report on progress against the delivery of equivalent consumption of unbundled loop services by BT Wholesale’s IPstream service.
Since our last report the UK has reached and passed the landmark of one million unbundled lines – see the article below.
This issue also includes updates on the delivery of equivalence for Wholesale and Backhaul Extension Services and WLR; on account management, and on the branding of Openreach.
Peter McCarthy-Ward
BT Director of Equivalence, BT Group
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BT Wholesale has been transferring existing ADSL and SDSL broadband end-users to the new Equivalence Management Platform (EMP) database as part of its commitment to deliver EoI.
The SDSL installed base has now been migrated. We plan that mass migration of the ADSL installed base will be complete by the end of March 2007. This fails to meet the Undertakings deadline of 31 December. As at 31 December 2006, BT had migrated 2.7m of its installed base of 8.5m ADSL end-users to the equivalent solution. The shortfall against the Undertakings target resulted from a BT decision not to accelerate migrations as originally planned, because the risk of an unacceptable customer experience for purchasers of IPstream was too great.
The revised schedule has been shared with both Ofcom and the EAB.
In December the Equality of Access Board reported that it had found a trivial breach in BT’s capture of New End-Users for asymmetric IPstream (see the EAB website). The problem related to a small number (some 1% of New End-Users and 0.1% of all provides) of customers, which BT’s processes could not readily identify as New End-Users. The problem was resolved during December when BT moved all IPstream provision to the equivalent solution. The service received by BT’s LLU or IPstream customers was not compromised by this trivial breach. BT is contacting its SMPF customers and discussing with them provision of an allowance on a goodwill basis.
View complete article "IPStream Consuming Local Loop Unbundling"
Openreach announced, in November, that the UK had achieved an important milestone in the telecoms market as the number of unbundled lines reached the one million mark. This is a 420 per cent increase in the number of unbundled lines since the creation of Openreach in January 2006. The number of unbundled lines continues to rise rapidly. By the end of 2006 it had reached 1.3 million. This tremendous growth means that Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is now a critical component of the highly competitive UK broadband market, providing a route to market for companies wishing to install their own equipment in BT exchanges.
View complete article "LLU Exceeds One Million Lines in the UK"
Openreach is pleased to announce that the installed base of Wholesale Wholesale Extension Services (WES) and Backhaul Extension Services (BES) services was successfully migrated to EoI status over the Ready for Service weekend of the 29/30 September 2006. Work is now continuing at speed to migrate all other BT Services that use WES/BES products as a whole or component part of an end-to-end service.
BT undertook to provide Wholesale Line Rental (WLR Analogue or PSTN) on an Equivalence of Inputs (EoI) basis for new end-users by 30 June 2007 (the ‘RFS’ date). By this date BT has also committed that all its downstream new end-users would be provided using the EoI WLR3 product.
View complete article "Wholesale Line Rental Equivalence of Input"
The BT Undertakings provide for Communication Providers who buy products from both BT Wholesale and Openreach to choose whether they wish to have Account Management relationships with both Lines of Business (and if so whether they wish this to be in two parallel relationships i.e. separate relationships or a single coordinated one) or with BT Wholesale only.
Openreach is making good progress against its rebranding milestones and will pass the first later this month.