I'm slightly astonished that we're in this situation in 2016. My old
fart memory goes back as far as the mid 1980s, when BT had just been
privatised out of the Post Office, and people were trying to move beyond
their 300/1200 acoustic coupler modems on phones hard-wired into the
wall. The approval bar very high for what 3rd-party equipment
(even phone handsets !) could be connected to their new-fangled jack
sockets, and many similar accusations of test delays, expensive tests,
potential conflicts of interest, anti-competitiveness etc were being
bandied around.

The solution at the time was that approval testing was spun out into an
independent 3rd party, BABT (* British Approvals Board for
Telecommunications). AFIACT it appeared to resolve the situation very
well. I don't know exactly what BABT does now, but feels like a
similar solution is called for these days...

Keith


(*)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Approvals_Board_for_Telecommunications

On 08/17/2016 04:45 AM, Mike Jenkins wrote:
>> 
>> Is there any way to track which hardware and firmware versions
>> have been submitted to BT (or whoever does it on their behalf) for
>> Modem Conformance Testing? I can find the details of how the
>> process works but not which devices have been approved or submitted
>> and pending approval.
> 
> This process is an absolute nightmare at the moment. If one ISP 
> submits a modem/firmware/software combo to Openreach, then it's only 
> approved for that one ISP unless they specifically ask for it to be 
> public. It appears that most do not... In addition, a software 
> upgrade means that the whole approval process has to be repeated. 
> This is not conducive to getting bug/security fixes out to
> customers. With BT unwilling to provide the "BT Openreach" branded
> Huaweii or ECT modems any more, this is just spiralling into a
> bureaucratic mess!
> 
> The team are responsive if you are a customer, but I'm not sure that 
> there's any way for an end user to get at this level of detail.

On 08/17/2016 05:16 AM, Steve Howes wrote:
> This is also worth a read
> 
> http://www.revk.uk/2016/08/pointless-tests-at-bt-martlesham.html

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