Limited Service Selection is a BT Wholesale (BTW) offering traditionally used by smaller, slow growth ISPs that have trouble raising capital to pay BTW’s exorbitant Central Pipe set-up fees. Rather than pay BTW to install hundreds of megabits of interconnect bandwidth, the smaller ISP will pay for their customers’ traffic to transit another usually larger ISP as well as BT’s broadband network, before going out to the Internet.
The advantage is a much more palatable pay-as-you-go pricing model however the downside is that the smaller ISP loses control of the traffic and is totally reliant upon another ISP (often a competitor) to manage their network responsibly. Clearing faults can take longer since the smaller ISP often has to isolate their network from those of several suppliers before they can diagnose and resolve an incident. However, as long as the ISP is up front with their customers about what they are doing, LSS is a perfectly legitimate option and we at Griffin have several partners using our network via LSS.
During 2008, as part of the 21CN roll-out, BTW will be offering ISPs the option to connect with their broadband network over Ethernet and the cost of BTW interconnects is likely to drop steeply. Consequently ISPs are reluctant to fork out the £175,000 set-up fee for a Central Pipe now when it could be redundant within six months. Unless BTW cut the cost of installing Central Pipes immediately and reduce minimum contract terms, orders for Central Pipes will dry up as more and more ISPs share bandwidth amongst themselves while the wait for BTW’s new Ethernet platform. This could have a negative effect on the service offered by ISPs, as well as on BT Wholesale’s 2008 sales budget.
Source: Comms Dealer May.
Andrew Dickinson
