BT Openreach Tweaks UK ISP Line Rental and Abortive Visit Charges

BTOpenreach, which maintains BT’s national telecoms network, has tweaked the prices that ISPs and other communications providers must pay for line rental (LLU and WLR), missed appointments, aborted engineer visits and unbundled line migrations. Some charges are more expensive while others are a little cheaper.

The new price changes for line rental (annual +vat prices) and related phone migrations have been set to reflect the conclusion of appeals against Ofcom’s 2012 LLU/WLR charge control. The move, which is to be implemented today, will affect both BTWholesale Line Rental (WLR) and unbundled line rental (LLU SMPF / MPF) services from third party ISPs like TalkTalk and Sky Broadband etc.

Openreach’s Wholesale Line Rental and LLU Price Changes

WLR Basic rental – price per annum – £94.75 (old price) – £93.27 (new price)
LLU MPF rental – price per annum – £85.04 (old price) – £84.26 (new price)
LLU SMPF rental – price per annum – £10.40 (old price) – £9.75 (new price)
LLU MPF Singleton Migration – £30.82 (old price) – £30.65 (new price)
LLU SMPF Connection/Singleton Migration – £30.82 (old price) – £30.65 (new price)

Separately Openreach are also changing both the charge that it raises when an appointment fails due to customer or end user “issues” and the payment that it pays out to ISPs where an appointment fails because of a mistake or other “issue” caused by Openreach itself. The price for both of these is increasing by the same amount of £5.

The above changes will be implemented from 1st August 2013. Generally none of the adjustments are too hefty and as a result end-users are unlikely to see much of a change in the prices they pay.