Nov 2021
Updated July 2023
With regards to “Internet Access” and landline phones, basically BT have no “real” competition!
BT started out as the GPO (General Post Office and other names) and were at one time a “publicly owned” entity . At some point the “GPO” was carved up and sold off. BT (British Telecom) was now the “Telecoms” bit. “Royal Mail” is “letters and parcels”. Ultimately BT was carved up and Openreach was now the new name for the part of the BT Group that looked after the “Infrastructure”. BT became the “retail arm” that basically looked after the sales and marketing and “customer services”. Openreach are actually a “Wholly owned subsidiary” of BT so there are confusions about the “roles” of BT & Openreach but in principle they are the same animal! However, Openreach don’t “deal” with consumers directly.
The “Internet”, actually refers to an “Infrastructure” of cables, routers and switches etc. In the UK this “Infrastructure” is owned by BT and is maintained by Openreach. In principle BT own the “backbone” of the infrastructure (in the UK). Kingston Telecoms (Hull area) and Virgin media have their own infrastructure but to obtain access to all of the towns and Cities in the UK and “overseas”, they need to access the BT infrastructure. This applies to “Internet Access” and “Telephone services”.
This infrastructure originally started in the early days of telegraph, see Internet Origins and Openreach have updated most of (if not all) of the Infrastructure to use optical fibre cables. Virgin (and all other ISPs) provide a conduit (access point) to the BT infrastructure to get full access to the “Internet” as a whole (Global).
The BT infrastructure is a “Communications Highway” and is now mostly digital. Telephone services now use the “Digital / communications Highway” to provide VOB (Voice over Broadband) / VOIP (Voice over IP) which means your voice calls are no longer “analogue” and now use the “Digital Highway”. Cables from the premises to the “BT Cabinet” (usually at the end of the street) are still copper but from the Cabinet to the main Infrastructure, optical fibre cable are now mostly used. BT originally used a “Local (telephone) Exchange “model” and this still exists – sort off but BT now have “Cabinets” at the end of most Streets and this, in effect, brings the “Exchange” to the end of the Street. The Cabinets are then connected back to the “Local Exchange” using optical fibre cables. This enables BT to offer better / faster Broadband connections using ADSL.
This infrastructure is awesome and the logistics of this infrastructure is mind boggling. It includes satellite and microwave connections and is very robust, it is almost “bomb proof” due to the “mesh like” connections (think spiders web). The design of the infrastructure means that it has a built-in “redundancy” to facilitate “equipment and cable failures” so if a “link” goes down, it uses a different route. It perhaps isn’t quite yet “self healing” but maybe one day 🙂
Basically any household or business can access this awesome infrastructure but not for free 🙂 BT own and control this infrastructure and it is maintained by Openreach. If you want a “Broadband internet” connection and / or an alternative telephone provider, you need need to use an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to access this infrastructure. In this case BT are an ISP but they also own the infrastructure!
Past and present governments have introduced “pseudo competition” and the likes of “Talk Talk” and “Plusnet (now BT owned)” etc give the illusion of competition but the “Pseudo competition” use the existing (BT owned) cables to the customer premises to access the BT infrastructure, which is still owned and controlled by BT (British Telecom). In principle, the “Pseudo competition” only really provide an extension to the BT customer base but are able to offer a different “pricing” structure, due to the “wholesale and retail arrangements”, this apparently is considered to be competition!
Sky act as an ISP for Broadband and Phones but they still use the BT infrastructure all the way from customer premises. However they do have a separate TV service which is mainly via satellite and they also offer Mobile phone services as an “agent” of (currently) O2.
Virgin (and Sky) are basically the modern day “Rediffusion” (who provided an alternative means of obtaining a TV signal instead of using a roof top aerial.) Unlike Sky, Virgin have their own infrastructure and they provide an alternative TV signal, Broadband connection and Telephone services by installing a “single copper” (mainly underground) cable from the “Virgin Cabinet” at the end of the street to customer premises.The Virgin cabinet is then connected back to the Virgin infrastructure via underground optical fibre cable(s).
Most of this Virgin infrastructure was installed about 20 years ago apparently by various Cable Companies e.g. Yorkshire Cable and at the time this was an absolute game changer that apparently left BT treading water but did it? The main game changing situation was that “cable companies” were now able to offer “Broadband Internet”. Initially this was a connection of about 500 Kbps (Kilo bits per second). Compared to the “Dial up modems” that only offered something like a 56 kbps at best but usually a lot less. However, the BT infrastructure had to be accessed at some point, the same as it is now.
Note. Around this time BT were using ISDN which was very expensive. This was ultimately superseded by ADSL which was affordable for most households. Unfortunately you had to be within a 1 or 2 miles “radius” of the local exchange to get a decent Broadband connection
The (now) Virgin infrastructure has probably been replaced and added to over the years but it is a similar infrastructure to that (now) used by BT. The Virgin infrastructure maybe separate but at some point they have to “tap in / access” the BT infrastructure.
With regards to broadband (Internet access), Virgin are still only an ISP (Internet Service Provider). This means, like all other ISPs, they basically provide a conduit to the BT infrastructure which allows its customers to get full access to the “Internet based services” e.g. WWW, Mail, FTP, Cloud storage etc. The Virgin infrastructure is just as awesome as BT but they can offer super fast Broadband connection of currently up to 500 Mbits/sec. However this only applies to the Virgin infrastructure. When the BT infrastructure is accessed, Virgin have no control!
With regards to telephone services, Virgin need to access the BT infrastructure to get full access.
When it comes to TV services, Virgin, like Sky, have their own equipment but feed the “TV signals / data” down the Single Cable to the premises. Set top boxes are used to receive the TV signals so you can watch a lot of telly channels. Their competitors are SKY and FreeSat (Who use Satellite to get TV signals to the premises) and Freeview (who use existing rooftop aerials). In all cases, “Set top boxes” are needed to receive the TV signals. If you only want to watch the 5 “Free to Air” TV channels, you only need a tuner and this is built-in to TVs as standard. Set top boxes give you the opportunity to access 100s of channels and can offer things like pause and record etc.
Virgin also have a “mobile phone” service (similar to Sky) but they are in principle a Mobile Service Provider that “act as agents” for (currently) EE / BT. The SIM (card) in your mobile device sorts this out, you could of course get a SIM directly from EE (currently owned by BT ). Changes are coming, if you use the 5G (mobile) services your Virgin SIM will be using Vodaphone and ultimately 4G mobile will be ported over to Vodaphone.
BT could (in theory) match or better the Broadband connection speeds of Virgin because they own the (overall) infrastructure but appear to choose not to do so.
BT are basically “Telephone / Telecoms” providers that offer Broadband Internet but their main business is telephones (its good to talk). The “Infrastructure” of the “Telephone / Telecoms System” is owned by BT and this “infrastructure” is also used for broadband internet connections.
BT do offer FTTP (Fibre To The Premises), which offers connection speeds of up to 900Mbps which is as good as or better than Virgin but this isn’t yet available in all areas. The ultra fast connections offered by Virgin will only be applicable to their equipment but when they have to (ultimately) access the BT infrastructure, they are at the mercy of BT / Openreach. Virgin have no control over the BT / Openreach infrastructure!
You could maybe have a Porsche or Jaguar (etc) car that is capable of “breakneck” speeds but on the UK motorways the maximum speed you can legally drive at is 70 MPH. With regards to broadband connections, the Internet (an infrastructure) is like a motorway and is often referred to as the “Digital Highway”. With this in mind, the “bottle neck” is the BT infrastructure. This infrastructure is under the total control of BT / Openreach and is subject to stuff like “Contention ratios”, Bandwidth and “traffic management”. At times the “traffic” has to be regulated so your super fast Broadband connection may, at times, be somewhat less than “super fast”.
In conclusion.
BT don’t really have any competition with regards to Broadband and Telephones because they own and control the infrastructure in the UK. All other competition is basically pseudo because the “competition” still have to use the BT infrastructure at some point and this also applies to Virgin. All other ISPs, including Sky, talk talk and Plusnet etc, use the existing BT infrastructure and basically act as “agents” for BT.
BT now provide TV services but seem to use Sky and Freeview so they don’t offer any real competition to Sky or Virgin.
BT do have competition when it comes to “Mobile” phones, where the “traffic” is mobile device to mobile device using “voice” and / or text. BT now own EE which has a very large customer base but O2 are a close second. Vodafone and Three offer some competition. The “mobile phone system” is a separate infrastructure and operates independently from the “BT “cable” Infrastructure” but when mobile devices need to access the “internet”, they need to use the BT “Cable” infrastructure, at some point.
In closing.
With regards to Broadband connections, BT will likely offer FTTP to “New Houses / new housing estates” because it’s just as easy to “lay” new fibre cables instead of copper cables to the premises and on “new” builds it’s likely the cables will be underground any way.
BT (now) mostly have FTTC (Fibre To The Cabinet) but still make use of the existing overhead cables from the cabinet to the premises. With regards to the “connection speeds” BT are more than capable of offering connection speeds of up to 900 Mbps.
Whatever the cable, fibre or copper, the same cable will be used to provide Broadband, telephone and TV.
BT own and control the “Infrastructure” that is used for “Internet access” and Telephonic services. BT don’t have any competition they only have customers!
With regards to Mobile phones, BT own EE who have the “Lions share” of customers so they have competition in the mobile arena.
With regard to TV services, BT use Sky or Freeview and don’t offer any competition.
With regard to Telephony, land lines are soon to become redundant and will no longer be offered. Your “Telephone instrument” will be connected to the broadband router (Internet Gateway) and all voice calls will be routed through the broadband router. It is likely that this is already being done if you have had a new router from Virgin or Sky in the past year or so. If you have a new Sky Broadband router, all your voice calls go through the router and you don’t have to pay for voice calls. This maybe similar with Virgin.
In closing, BT don’t really have any competition with regards to Broadband or Telephony, they only have customers.