The State of Play

Here's some geeky detail on how I think things currently stand.

Openreach

Openreach are effectively the wholesale infrastructure arm of BT. They are responsible for the physical cables, ducts in the ground, and poles in the air. They are rolling out a fibre optic based network, and aim to have xx% of the UK covered by YYYY. As a wholesale operator, they offer a set menu of fibre internet services that they then sell to the retail arm of BT and any other internet provider that wishes to resell their services. So if you sign up with BT, PlusNet, EE, Sky, Vodafone, Zen (etc etc), there's a good chance that your service is being provided using Openreach tech and your data is then handed over to your internet provider at the local telephone exchange or other connection point for onward routing.

This means that the speeds these ISPs offer and the prices they can afford to charge are essentially set by Openreach, and therefore services they each offer tend to be very similar.

Brsk/YouFibre

Around the country there are a number of plucky start up companies running their own fibre cables to provide an alternative to Openreach. This is a horrendously expensive task, and there has already been some consolidation as companies merge or get taken over to try to relieve their huge debts. Many of these companies also provide their fibre infrastructure on a wholesale basis to retail internet providers. So your chosen provider, say Zen, might elect to provide your connection via one of these alternate fibre providers if they are available in your area and they have an agreement with them. This allows them to provide faster services at a lower price than the 'vanilla' options from Openreach.

In Baildon we have Brsk.. Which is now YouFibre... Which has recently agreed to be aquired by Virgin Media O2... Many of these 'alt-nets' as they are known, minimise the amount of digging they need to do by renting space in cable ducts and on telegraph poles from Openreach. So although the fibre cables and equipment used to connect it all together is owned by Brsk/YouFibre, the physcial infrastructure used to run the fibre is rented from Openreach. This is why the telegraph poles in Baildon are starting to look.. a bit 'busy'. OR have their own fibre up there, their old copper based services, and now additional fibre cables, connector blocks etc from Brsk/YouFibre.

This also seems to be why the Brsk/YouFibre footprint misses the same houses that Openreach fibre does. If OR have elected not to run fibre infrastructure to a property for some reason, it seems Brsk/YouFibre have teneded just to follow their lead and miss them out as well. This could well be due to a physical problem such as a blocked duct which OR have not yet resolved.

Virgin Media

Traditionally the only other big player in the Broadband market was Virgin Media (and the cable TV/Internet companies that came before them.) In Baildon VM have an extensive network of underground ducts and cabling and can provide gigabit speeds using coaxial copper cables originally designed for transmitting TV channels. This technology is now considered out of date and VM do have plans to replace this with 'full fibre'. But there is no public plan to show which areas will be upgraded when. This is also confused by the fact that VM have been selling fibre based services in some areas using fibre provided by Nexfibre, and are also now looking to finalise the purhase of Netomnia who own Brsk and YouFibre! So soon, VM may own two networks that cover the majority of Baildon. Which will mean they'll have a modern fibre network which costs them in duct and pole rental charges from Openreach, and an out of date cable TV network running through their own ducts.