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The CEO of network access provider Openreach, Clive Selley, has once again called on the government to help boost the UK roll-out of gigabit-capable broadband networks by making a number of key changes to several new bills. But gaining acceptance of these calls has proven difficult, particularly with a group of cross-party MPs campaigning for the opposite.
At present, Openreach’s growing Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network already covers around 18 million premises (there are around 32.5m across the United Kingdom) and they aim to reach 25 million by December 2026. The operator has also expressed an ambition to reach “up to” 30 million by 2030, which was given a boost last month after Ofcom’s latest Telecoms Market Review (TAR) showed it wasn’t going to upset the apple cart.
Despite this, Clive Selley has long been campaigning for the government to make more changes to help move things along, many of which are also supported by the wider industry (here, here and here). But there are differences of agreement on the detail between broadband operators, as nobody wants to hand Openreach and unfair advantage (e.g. the ability to upgrade MDUs that others cannot access in the same way).
The most common calls tend to echo a strong desire for the full embracement of flexi-permits to boost street works and a push for easier access to run new fibre into large residential buildings (MDUs), such as in cases where operators struggle to identify or communicate with the building owner(s). The latter impacts around a million UK tenants.
Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said (Mail on Sunday):
“We work in the streets, we work in the pavements and we work in the roads. So we ask for permission a third of a million times a year. Councils are under cost and staffing pressures, so this generates huge amounts of work.
Pushing [flexi-permits] through at pace wouldn’t just reduce workload, it would increase the pace at which we could build, and take the cost away from the councils. It’s a win-win with no taxpayer money involved.
…
In many of the apartment blocks in London, the owner’s address is a PO Box in the British Virgin Islands. So you write them a letter and will not hear back.”
The ability to deliver changes like this would require new legislation, which Openreach and others envisage as coming through tweaks to the new Renters’ Rights Bill (here) and the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (here). But so far the first draft of both bills have largely appeared to exclude such calls, although future amendments may yet see them being debated over the coming months.
On top of that, Openreach’s push for change will meet opposition from MPs in different parties, although it’s not yet clear how much success they will have when or if such amendments come up for debate in parliament.
Mark Francois, Conservative MP for Rayleigh and Wickford, said:
“Openreach have a bloomin’ cheek. They have already had years to install fibre networks and should really have finished the job by now. Why should long-suffering motorists have to endure more frustrating delays because Openreach can’t get the job done efficiently in the first place?”
The above comment is interesting as most people with knowledge of such networks recognise that deploying optical fibre cables down almost every single street and lane in the UK was always going to take around a decade or more to complete, with payback on that also taking 10-15 years to realise. Hence why the government ultimately set the Project Gigabit goal for achieving nationwide (c.99%) coverage of gigabit-capable broadband as 2030.
Openreach only started (or re-started) large scale deployments of FTTP technology in 2018 and then took several years to ramp that up, but there’s a limit to how fast you can go on a commercial basis. On the other hand, it could be argued that the network operator’s effective abandonment of their original FTTP roll-out (here), which started in 2009/10 before stalling around 2012/13 for some years, does mean that they could have got here much faster if they really wanted.
However, it was also clear in 2012/13 that Openreach hadn’t got the right systems, processes or machinery necessary to conduct both a fast and truly economically efficient deployment. This took several years to correct. But it wasn’t until rivals, like CityFibre, really began posing a serious threat to their copper centric focus that all of this finally got resolved.
Time will tell whether network operators get their way in the new bills currently passing through parliament, although even without that we’d still expect the government’s core coverage goals to be largely achievable by the current target. But whether or not everybody (e.g. some MDU tenants) will be able to access that remains to be seen.