Easynet's 240 unbundled exchanges allow it to reach around 4.4 million homes and offices, but to offer an unbundled service to everyone in the UK it would have to unbundle all of BT's 6,000-plus local exchanges, a bill that could run into the billions of pounds.
According to Ian Fogg, senior analyst at Jupiter, LLU gives operators more choice in what they offer to users. "It's up to the ISPs whether they decide to offer the same speeds for less money, faster speeds, or services such as voice-over-IP," says Fogg, who pointed out that in France unbundling has led to the rollout of innovative broadband services such as VoIP and IP television.
Fogg believes that urban areas will continue to benefit from better broadband services in "at least the short and medium term", but insists that this wasn't as negative a situation as a few years ago when high-speed services weren't widely available.
"Rural areas can get broadband, but if you live in urban areas you get more choice," says Fogg. There are many other factors that are considered when a business picks a location, including availability of land and transport links, where some rural areas could have an advantage, he explains.
Lindsey Annison, broadband activist and founder of the Access to Broadband Campaign, believes that public funding is needed to address the broadband divide.
"This Labour government encouraged a competitive broadband marketplace. Whoever is in government next needs a strategy that takes account of what's happened abroad," says Annison, pointing to South Korea where government intervention played a key role in boosting broadband availability and take-up.
Annison adds that local communities are still playing a vital role in providing broadband in areas where it isn't otherwise available, despite BT being on track to offer its ADSL service to 99.6 percent of homes and businesses by this summer.
"Community networks were expected to fall by the wayside, but that's not happened at all," says Annison.
Talkback
The Broadband divide now has many layers. BT has not given any indication if or when they may upgrade the remaining ~600 local exchanges to ADSL.
I am sadly in connected to one of these exchanges - it carries 130 lines and is only 2.3km from a main BT fibre route. Even worse that fibre joints at the bottom of my garden!
It only managed 32 registrations when the triggers were running, this was not helped by the switch not supporting ISDN. Everybody with an ISDN line is parented off another exchange with a different STD, so these lines were not counted against the local registrations. Possibly not counted against the viable / unviable decision either.
I am sure exchanges like this could be easily provisioned with a Mini DSLAM and a single 2Mb backhaul if BT were really committed. Hey, they may well get a return out of it!
Bulldog or Easynet are very wellcome to unbundle my local exchange. Perhaps we will be waiting some time.
A fair comment on the new Broadband Divide. The divide is huge when you consider some people could potentially have the choice of BT ADSL, BT SDSL, LLU such as Bulldog and a Cable provider. Contrast that with the poster above, his dialup and little prospect of ADSL.
I have had ADSL for 2 years and now upgraded to 2meg, couldn't imagine being without it! I suppose there are community broadband options but it seems that every project that went live was rapidly followed by BT activating ADSL in that area.
totally agree with this article, just what I thought when I read about it in the paper. I went straight to the website to see what it was really all about (can't trust papers to get the right story) and sure enough, it was only for the chosen few. AGAIN.
The countryside can whistle for decent broadband, no-one will deliver it. We are not economic. Even the funding streams set up to help us won't use the funds for us, they channel it into half baked schemes to 'raise awareness'. Anyone would think we weren't aware that we need decent bandwidth the same as everyone else!
As Graeme says, there is a new broadband divide actively growing again.