BT Openreach Confirm Final UK Phone and Broadband Prices for 1st July

BTOpenreach has posted a lengthy list of price changes that represent the final outcome of Ofcom’s Fixed Access Market Reviews (FAMR), which are due to take effect from 1st July 2014 and include everything from the expected line rental adjustments to cheaper fault fixing engineer visits (Special Fault Investigation) etc. The list is quite extensive.

The regulators final FAMR report (here), which also imposed new quality standards upon BT’s network, didn’t offer a clear breakdown of all the various price adjustments and so Openreach’s latest briefing makes for a very useful summary and even extends to other areas like time related charges (additional engineer costs etc.), tie cables and co-mingling (just skip those if you don’t know what they are).

Regular readers will already know about the expected line rental changes (both for BT’s own WLR and the unbundled LLU MPF/SMPF) products, which will impact most of the major broadband ISPs in some way, but there are also other cost changes that we haven’t covered much before and the relevant ones are summarised below (the rest are arguably of more interest to ISPs). Please check the briefing link above for a full summary.

In particular, we note that the cost of having an engineer investigate a fault (SFI) with your line (£124.97 +vat) or to install a new connection via BT’s national UK telecoms network (£44.49 for Wholesale Line Rental) is set to fall by 6-7%, while fully unbundled LLU (MPF) lines like the ones that TalkTalk and Sky Broadband use (note: Sky also has a fair few SMPF connections) will get 2-3% more expensive for new provides (£46.44) and annual rental (£86.11).

It’s likely that some ISPs may factor these changes into their forthcoming summer/autumn price updates, although we don’t anticipate a huge impact upon end-user prices because most of the changes are fairly small. NOTE: We recommend ignoring Openreach’s 17th May – 30th June 2014 column below as that was only temporary and will just confuse matters.

NOTE: The last one (GEA) refers to the recent FTTC migration price change.