Aquiss Community

As per the title, will Aquiss be offering the 1.2 and 1.8 Gbps services once Openreach finally stop pushing out the end of the trial and offer them to the market?

At present its just an Openreach trial product, so it will depend if BT Wholesale (who we and most providers use) then take them forward on to the wholesale market, for retail release.

Whilst BT Wholesale don't always completely mirror every Openreach product available, I would be surprised if they didn't. Our regular conversations with them have included these products, so they are aware, but at present no formal release has been discussed. However, as soon as practically possible, we hope to have some further news on these and other things we are in discussion about.

Just as a data-point; the OpenReach engineer who did my installation last week said that he had some of the 2.5Gbps ONTs in the back of his van, and seemed to think that the exchange end should be capable too. Being in the north-west of Northern Ireland, we're usually the last to get everything, so this was a bit surprising to hear. I understand that this doesn't mean that it's available for retail, but it suggests that they're moving forward with the infrastructure at least....

In areas that are Nokia based builds, we are indeed seeing an increased deployment of Nokia ONTs that are 2.5Gbps variants. An increase in Adtrans areas is also taking place and we have seen a couple of 2.5Gbps Adtrans ONTs being dropped there too, but less common.

Areas that are ECI (generally South West England) and Huawei will unlikely to see anything options as this stage as network kit needs changing.

All over the news today - OpenReach supposedly launching the 1.8Gbps service on 1st April (interesting choice of date!)

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/988 ... april-2024

The key bit is Openreach

So I mentioned earlier in the thread, it's now going to depend on the wholesale access, such as BT Wholesale, to when and if they launch these products. BT Wholesale is Openreach's customer, rather than ISPs, in most cases.

I think it would be best for me to add the following, regarding higher speeds.

Most providers take via a wholesale channel handover (BT Wholesale etc), as I stated earlier, so I suspect it will be in Q3/Q4 before they start arriving within the retail space.

Other key points are, customers own hardware will need support speeds above 1Gbps. Whilst some routers have started to arrive to market with a single 2.5Gbps WAN, LAN ports are often still limited to 1Gbps, along with most desktops, laptops etc also limited to 1Gbps on their network Ethernet interfaces.

The race beyond 1Gbps will be coming at great expense if customers need to move to a 10Gbps base network. We as a business have to factor all this in when deploying commercial retail options.

Therefore whilst speeds above 1Gbps are something we are aware of, on balance we still see moving more customers to a FTTP, from copper products, as higher value priorities to us as a business. This is also a similar viewpoint I'm hearing from other providers that I personally speak to in private. I therefore expect Q3 or Q4 will be the first drops of trials for 1Gbps+ products from us.

Completely understand your view from a business perspective.

However, I would like to think that Aquiss would have a higher percentage of IT enthusiasts/professionals than other ISPs owing to the features that are offered (Static IP, IPv6, no trash router provided etc). I may be wrong of course.

I for one have already upgraded my home network over the course of last year to 10GbE and 2.5/5GbE where appropriate in preparation for Multigig products to hit the FTTP market.

For it's worth I would be interested in taking the 1.2Gbps purely for the 20% increase in upload speed, so I would be fine to keep the 1Gbps client hardware - the increase in download above 1Gbps would make no difference to me.

I'm guessing this is still down the the mercy of BT Wholesale not offering the package from Openreach considering Aquiss has now launched 1.2Gb & 2.5Gb on CityFibre