Asset reuse specialist AssetHUB has today claimed that an estimated 100,000km of publicly funded full fibre broadband cables in UK rural and hard to reach areas, allegedly worth over £1.4bn (total state aid), could be “left underutilised due to a lack of visibility” and “despite open networking being a condition of receiving taxpayers’ money“.
The aforementioned reference relates to the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband roll-out programme, which is being overseen by the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency. But AssetHUB clams that some builders of related networks “could be failing to make their cables easily available to other operators” and thus “holding back plans to ‘level-up’ remote communities across the UK.”
The company is thus urging all network builders that have received funding through BDUK to make sure they know where their fibre is deployed and advise that this infrastructure is open for use by other companies. “BDUK provides public money for rural deployments that are mandated to provide wholesale access to passive, active, backhaul and dark fibre,” said AssetHUB, which is of course an area where they have a clear vested interest.
Rob Leenderts, CEO of AssetHUB, said:
“The UK Altnet industry is at a risk of more unnecessary overbuild as new entrants rush to deploy new infrastructure without considering the long-term sustainability of their business models. AssetHUB’s BDUK Project Gigabit-compliant trading platform for purchasing and selling infrastructure and services helps network builders map their fibre networks for visibility. It also makes sure approved ISPs and other network builders are aware and able to gain access to the network, securely, offering those that have not received funding an alternative to building more fibre.
For those network builders who have funded their own network buildouts, there is the added opportunity to generate some more revenue by selling space, services and unused fibre to other companies”.
On the one hand, it is true that those operators receiving state aid for related deployment contracts do face a wholesale obligation. On the other hand, making a commercial model for this is still down to the network operators’ and not every operator has seen fit to make the commercials attractive enough for others to use. But conflating the active and passive parts of this also makes for a rather more complex discussion, since they’re both very different sides of the same coin, where generalisations can cause confusion.
As for access at the infrastructure layer. Most alternative networks prefer to use Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles, rather than that of other operators, because it is a regulated solution and one that has been reasonably well refined over many years.
Put another way, altnets tend to avoid building their own ducts and trenches where possible, which can make for quite a patchwork of infrastructure (awkward to harness). ISPreview explored the issues of infrastructure sharing in a bit more depth back in 2021 (here).
At this point it is important to remember that smaller alternative networks also carry much more financial risk than the established incumbents, which is often, but not always, reflected in the commercial models they come up with at wholesale. However, dedicated wholesale providers, such as CityFibre, do of course have more of an interest in making wholesale attractive, at least to retail ISPs.