Analyst talks to...David Campbell

David Campbell is managing director for next generation access, Openreach.

Hello David, can you describe your role at Openreach?

I have strategic responsibility for the design, development and delivery of a range of NGA solutions. In particular, I'm working on the Openreach aspects of the delivery of BT's £1.5 billion fibre investment, as announced by Ian Livingston last year. I'm also responsible for the Openreach NGA forum, which I established about six months ago. This is a body that includes many Openreach communications providers' (CPs) customers, as well as industry analysts, developers and representatives from Ofcom.

To what degree is Openreach working with the industry on formulating and deploying NGA?

We've consulted very widely and in detail with the industry. This includes everything from the definition of the 'product' as well as positioning, pricing and its features and functions. Feedback we've had from CPs has helped us to create a roadmap for additional features and functions that are a priority for our CP customers.

Our customers have also worked with us to determine which exchanges would be first for NGA deployment. We've used a decision-support model which has been fed with CP and regional development agency (RDA) data and preferences.

In addition, we've formed a trialist working group, which is proving to be especially helpful in driving development and roll-out. We've established a 'network in a box' offering for members of this group. They can take it away and carry out their own FTTC testing themselves, at their own pace.

What has Openreach and BT learned from the Ebbsfleet FTTP pilot?

We are continuing to learn a great deal from Ebbsfleet and from our internal FTTC technical pilot underway at Foxhall in Suffolk. I know that Ebbsfleet is providing us with a great deal of valuable insight as to how NGA will impact on the end customer environment, especially in relation to important aspects such as service distribution around the home and back-up power requirements.

We've also learned just how important it is to have a very skilled call centre operation that can equip our engineers with foresight into different customers and their individual home environment set-ups. This helps to save so much time and creates a much improved customer experience.

Does Openreach remain confident about consumer demand for high-speed fibre given that some commentators believe the broadband market is becoming saturated?

Well, we're very encouraged by the early signs. We know that five major CPs are willing to work with us and invest their time, money and effort towards making this a success.

We're not assuming NGA will necessarily grow the broadband market or increase penetration. What we are saying is that this is a premium product that can be offered to a percentage of the market that wants to use applications that require higher speeds - speeds that are provided by these technologies.

Historically there's been a Catch 22 situation where no-one has been developing applications because of the lack of the delivery platform, while the willingness to deploy a platform has been held back through lack of demand for applications.

We've broken this vicious circle. We're on our way to getting something out there which tests the market and gives our customers the confidence to develop the applications which will drive the need for high speed broadband.

And the future of NGA? What's next?

We've been focussed on FTTC so far but we do see a space for FTTP to emerge in some situations. This is something we will look at more closely and I am in the process of setting up a fairly major FTTP trial to examine some of the deployment issues.

I also think that we will look at better exploitation of the bandwidth available to us thanks to NGA in the future. Not just the downstream, but the upstream too. We hope CPs and consumers will start to see the possibilities.

Finally, how has the Openreach organisation changed over the past four and a half years since its inception?

I'd say we've come a long way. The organisation is now recognised for delivering excellent service. We're now much more regionally focused, we have a healthy relationship with Ofcom and our CP customers, and we're poised for some exciting times ahead as NGA becomes a reality.