BT boss to Oz: we're wonderful and so is copper

BT's boss has taken the opportunity during a visit to Australia to heap praise on his company's domestic broadband rollout, and antipodeans are lapping it up, with the local network builder promising to share information about how to build “superfast broadband”.

In a drop to the Murdoch organ The Australian, nbn^TM boss Bill Morrow said Australia's broadband rollout will draw its “best practice” on the BT model.

The arrangement was reached during a visit to Australia by BT CEO Gavin Patterson, who met with Morrow, communications minister and BT cheerleader Malcolm Turnbull, plus unspecified BT clients.

“From a fibre-to-the-node perspective BT/Openreach has pulled off an extraordinarily efficient network rollout in the UK and we want to learn as much as we can from them”, Morrow told The Australian.

Since he's interested, The Register would offer a few thoughts to Morrow from BT's recent history.

1. Talent is key, so Morrow should try raiding the banking sector for management talent.

2. Whatever you're rolling out, call it “superfast”. G.fast – the genuinely “superfast” broadband – is only on BT's trial plans (and isn't yet on nbn^TM's build plans at all), but even the UK's “bumpkin broadband” gets the tag. Ofcom's data puts the UK average at 22.8Mbps, just below ADSL2+'s maximum.

3. It's vital to ignore criticism over the cost or speed of the rollout.

Patterson naturally enough told The Oz that his rollout, and the FTTN model BT uses, is working (which CEO ever described their current government-funded project as an utter train wreck while still in the job?).

He also claimed that BT is getting – present tense – 500 Mbps through its copper infrastructure, which must refer to Adastral Park and a trial site or two, since G.fast hasn't yet been rolled out in commercial services. ®