No BS*: BT is hooking up with OneWeb to tackle UK notspots

Re: Well, they must be

They also have the advantage of being in partnership with an organisation that seems intent on undermining its own connectivity.

A relative of mine has been in a rural "not spot" for some years, but BT/OpenReach have finally made FTTP available - at least in theory. The first order went through a local BT business franchise and mysteriously disappeared. The second order was placed directly with BT and a site survey was completed.

A lone engineer eventually appeared to do the installation and discovered that, despite the site survey, he'd need to run fibre over 4 poles rather than from just the one he was anticipating. Somewhat later, 4 engineers turned up and discovered that, despite the site survey, one of the intermediate poles had not been inspected sufficiently recently for it to be deemed safe to climb. Somewhat later, a cherry picker arrived and the driver, despite the site survey, deemed the road too steep to be able to use it safely. Very quickly, everyone disappeared.

You can see how it might just be easier to launch a constellation of satellites.

Re: Sincerely, Good Luck

Not just big cities.

I’m about 5miles from the centre of Glasgow but my FTTC maxes out at about 50mbps on a good day since I’m quite far from the cabinet. Also In the blind spot between 2 virgin areas so no help there. Cityfibre? have been putting stuff in all over the place but not selling to end users as far as I can tell and not neat enough to my estate anyway.

FTTP from OpenReach? That’ll be the 25th of never.

Might go 5G with 3 though. Colleague has that and is getting 200/30 on a bad day.

Re: Sincerely, Good Luck

The wild card in all this is Starlink. I'm not a big fan of Elon Musk. He seems more than a bit unstable, and is not overly devoted to truthtelling, and is prone to wildly overpromise. But he does have remarkable organizational skills.

Errmm. Nope. If he did, he'd have been able to deliver on all the stuff that's been promised. Hypeloops, Tesla semis, the Roadster Mk2, fully autonomous self-driving etc etc. And not been having a series of unfortunate recalls.

He is, of course the salesman that delivered the Vegas Loop. Flashy CGI ends up being Teslas in a drainpipe. Truly remarkable and revolutionary! Especially why, even with fully autonomous self-driving the cars still need a driver. Factories manage to guide vehicles around their plants without drivers, Tesla.. can't.

And SpaceX is throwing a LOT of money at the project. And as far as I can see, there's nothing Starlink is trying to do that couldn't be and surely was costed out with fair precision on a cocktail napkin before work began. So it seems possible that he and his company will come to the rescue of those of us who don't live in big cities.

Ah, well, that gets a bit more complicated. SpaceX possibly isn't spending money, various SPV subsidiaries are. So they're paying market-ish* rates to launch satellites, not the rates being charged to SpaceX's government contracts. But what has probably been costed on a napkin is the $3-6bn+ government pork up for grabs to provide broadband for the rural US.

That's the goal. Grab as much of that subsidy as you can, then figure out how to scale the network and deliver a service. Easy enough to do when you've only got a few beta customers. They'll report stuff like lightning strikes, or terminals overheating** and shutting down. Those should be simple engineering fixes, providing you don't have to re-work a few thousand sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Some of it's 'Gigafactories' have plenty of space now Panasonic's moved out.

But that's always been the challenge between visions and reality. Musk is good at one, not so much at realisation. And if the market suddenly comes to the same realisation, Tesla's share price collapses, and margin calls follow given most of Musk's wealth is backed by his stock. As would be any loans. But SpaceX has been successful in attracting government pork, along with regularly tapping the market for more debt. But an IPO may be due soon, and it's investors can cash out.. Although a prospectus would have to reveal financials that are currently hidden.

As for execution, OneWeb's problem was they had the satellites, but couldn't seem to deliver the service. I had several meetings with them on behalf of a large carrier. We wanted a simple, turnkey solution that'd be easy to order and provision.. And OneWeb couldn't do that. But it's a hard thing to do right, which is where partnering wiith BT makes a lot of sense. They have field engineers & ops people that can do the provisioning.. And potentially outside the UK given BT's international relationships.

*Government contracts often have annoying stuff in them, like wanting 'most favored nation' type pricing deals. So they get the lowest price, and then might want open book accounting*** and permit a modest profit margin. So if Starlink's paying X per launch, why is US government customers paying 3.14X?

** That pesky Warble Gloaming again. But fear not, Musk will save the planet. Possibly multiple planets. Or just be rather well placed to extract billions more in subsidies..

*** Simple solution is to have more than one set of books. But Musk does seem to have a problem with retaining CFOs.