Supporting fibre investment: unrestricted duct and pole access, and the BCMR

Supporting fibre investment: unrestricted duct and pole access, and the BCMR Add to Your Pages

02 November 2018

Companies laying high-speed fibre cables used by large businesses, mobile operators and broadband providers will have greater access to Openreach's ducts and poles, under proposals set out today by Ofcom.

The plans are published alongside a consultation on Ofcom's Business Connectivity Market Review, which looks at competition for dedicated, high-speed leased lines'.

Unrestricted access to Openreach's ducts and poles

In July 2018, we set out long-term plans to support investment in fibre networks. This included introducing unrestricted access to Openreach's underground ducts and telegraph poles next year.

Under Ofcom rules, Openreach, which maintains the UK's main broadband network, is required to let competing providers use its telegraph poles and underground ducts to lay their own fibre cables. This measure can cut the upfront cost of building full-fibre networks by around half, though it is currently restricted to companies offering primarily residential broadband services.

We want to give companies greater flexibility to lay fibre networks that serve residential or business customers. So today, we are consulting on proposals to allow access to Openreach's ducts and poles to companies offering any type of telecoms services including high-speed lines for large businesses, networks carrying data for mobile operators and high capacity lines supporting broadband services. We intend to implement this unrestricted duct access from spring 2019.

Business Connectivity Market ReviewThe BCMR looks at leased lines' high-speed, high-quality, point-to-point data connections that telecoms providers use for connecting offices, mobile base stations, and broadband access networks. These lines also provide vital, high-capacity links for hospitals, schools and libraries. Our current regulation in this market expires in March 2019; so we are refreshing it, before moving to regulating the business and residential markets through a single review from 2021.

In geographic areas where the prospects for competition are low, we are proposing today to maintain charge controls on BT, keeping prices flat, as well as imposing strict quality of service standards. Where there is stronger competition, or prospective competition, we propose lighter regulation than existing rules, to allow this to flourish.

In some areas, even with duct and pole access, there is unlikely to be effective competition in the foreseeable future. So for connections from exchanges where BT faces no competition from rival operators, we are proposing that BT must give competitors physical access to its fibre-optic cables, allowing them to take direct control of the connection. This service is often referred to as dark fibre', because the cables would not be lit' using BT's electronic equipment. Instead, they would be lit' by the competitor installing its own equipment at either end of the optical fibre. We propose that BT should provide this dark fibre access at a price that reflects its costs.

Next stepsBoth of today's consultations will close on 18 January 2019, and we intend to publish our final conclusions in spring 2019.

We will also consult shortly on how we should define geographic areas as either competitive, potentially competitive or non-competitive in our single, holistic residential and business market review in 2021.

ENDS

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