Notes from the Watertower

Broadband - What does LLU mean?

In my last posting, I talked about BT owning all the kit in the exchange. Well, this isn’t strictly true - sometimes when you look for an Internet company, you’ll appear to have a choice of several companies, with BT being just one of them… What to remember is that via BT, it’s the BT Wholesale network, and through that, you have a choice of over 100 resellers of the BT wholesale network products, and BT Internet is just one of those resellers.

But what about the others? These are companies who’ve put their own equipment into the BT exchanges. They rent space off BT, they pay BT to connect the copper wires from the exchange to your premises to their kit instead of BTs kit, then provide your Internet connectivity directly through their network, from the exchange back to their own headquarters, rather than through the BT wholesale network.

LLU means Local Loop Unbundling. The “Local Loop” is the fancy name for the copper wires that go from the exchange to your premises. These providers “unbundle” the copper and take them off BT and into their own network. The local loop is sometimes called the “last mile”.

There are two levels of LLU - the first is simply piggybacking their Internet service on-top of the BT telephone service, and the second level is taking over the Telephone service as well. What’s best for you? Well, who knows, but lets’ put it this way… Here in Drogon Towers, we have a standard BT line which we pay BT for every month. We buy our Internet through Entanet (which we’re a reseller of, so we’re obviously prepared to put our money where our mouth is!) Incoming calls come via BT, but outgoing calls go out over the Internet line via our own VoIP service. This costs us the bare minimum BT charge (We pay a little extra for the privilege of having incoming caller ID), the ADSL broadband costs us £25 + VAT and then there’s the call charges on top of that. OK for a small business? We think so!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Internet, Telecoms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.