Openreach dares to contemplate retiring its copper network

UK fixed-line wholesaler Openreach has launched an industry consultation into the switch to ‘full fibre’, which would involve retiring the legacy copper one.

There’s not a lot of point shelling out for a fibre network covering the whole country if a bunch of people don’t use it. Furthermore the cost of maintaining two parallel networks would be prohibitive, so Openreach seems to be saying full fibre will only happen if everyone is fully committed to it. The purpose of this consultation seems to be to chuck that idea out there and see what the rest of the industry, including the government and Ofcom, has to say about it.

“…we’re consulting with broadband providers to decide how and when we upgrade customers to even faster, more reliable and future-proof, full fibre broadband,” said Katie Milligan, MD for Customer, Commercial and Propositions at Openreach. “We believe this consultation is crucial to that process, and it will support further investment from across the industry. We’re really ambitious about upgrading the UK to the fastest, most reliable broadband there is.”

These are the three main areas Openreach wants feedback from UK CSPs on:

Getting buy-in from the CSPs is vital, of course, because they and their customers are ultimately the ones that will pay for this network. The above points are all essentially about money: how are we going to pay for this network and make everyone use it? On top of those Openreach flagged up a few more specific ‘guiding principles’ that also need to be considered:

In other words those pesky ‘late adopters’ would eventually be given no choice but to upgrade. This is what Openreach had to say about the copper situation: “The process would start with a ‘no move back’ policy for premises connected with FTTP, followed by a ‘stop-sell’ of copper services to new customers, and ultimately a withdrawal in full.”

It seems a bit authoritarian, but if the economics of maintaining the copper network don’t add up then it’s hard to what alternatives there are. The danger of forcing consumers to take a service is that CSPs could take that opportunity to over-charge, so Ofcom will want to keep an eye on that side of things. The government, as ever, will ride on the coat-tails of the process in its never-ending search for cheap political capital.

“We’re building a Britain that’s fit for the future, and our plans for a national full fibre broadband network underpin our modern industrial strategy,”  said Minister for Digital Margot James. “Upgrading to gigabit capable connections will benefit homes and businesses all across the UK. I welcome Openreach’s consultation on how to make this process as simple and efficient as possible whilst ensuring a competitive market is in place for all consumers and infrastructure providers.”

Openreach also recently announced Salisbury is going to become the UK’s first place to get FTTP across an entire town, which will be complete in April 2020. It seems to be setting this up as an exemplar of how great everything can be if we all cooperate on this stuff and reap the consequent connectivity rewards. This consultation will be open until 3 May, after which Openreach will let us know how it went.