This service, which Openreach provides to Communications Providers (CPs), currently costs £60 a month but it will fall to £38 a month from June 2013. The company also announced the lower price will apply to the new Fibre-to-the-Premises on Demand (FoD) service that Openreach will launch and begin to make available in Spring 2013.
This service, which will offer downstream speeds of 330Mbps and upstream speeds of 30Mbps, will further future proof the network. This is because ultra-fast FTTP speeds will be available across the whole of BT's fibre footprint for the first time and not just from those exchanges that currently offer FTTP.
FoD is expected to be of most interest to certain small and medium sized enterprises who may wish to take advantage of the faster speeds on offer. Consumers and businesses can already access speeds of up to 80Mbps via Fibre-to-the-Cabinet services or much greater speeds via business services such as Ethernet.
As Openreach has previously indicated, CPs will be charged a distance based construction charge for FoD due to the extra work involved in providing a direct fibre connection. It will be for CPs to decide whether to pass this charge on to their customers.
These charges are currently being finalised and will be released closer to the launch date once the current trials have concluded. They will be based on a series of price bands relating to the premises’ distance from the local fibre network.
Premises are, on average, around 500 metres away from BT’s fibre network[2], a distance that will incur a charge of around a thousand pounds. Those that are closer will face a lesser charge and those further away a higher one. This is in addition to the installation fee of £500.
Mike Galvin, Managing Director NGA, Openreach, said: “Our fibre plans are going very well. Our deployment is one of the fastest in the world and our services are proving very popular with the public.
"It is now time for us to focus further on FTTP and I am pleased to say that we are making it more affordable than ever. I am sure that small businesses will welcome this major price cut and I am also sure that our fibre on demand plans will be of great interest.”