BT Openreach Cuts Line Rental, FTTC and LLU Prices by £75m for UK ISPs

BTOpenreach has announced a series of critical price reductions, alongside a couple of expected increases for line transfers and FTTC connection fees, that are intended to slash the charges applied to UK ISPs by approximately £75m per year.

Most of the changes, which have largely “been driven by charge controls” and Ofcom’s “regulatory requirements“, are intended to impact BT Wholesale Line Rental (WLR) and unbundled (LLU) based services. All of the following price changes will be implemented on the 1st April 2013 and no, that’s not a joke.

Elsewhere Openreach are also advising ISPs of an increase in the price of energy usage per kWh from £0.0905 to £0.1151 for all comingling products utilised for LLU, Access Locate and Access Locate Plus.

The move comes just over a week after Ofcom forced BT to pay a fine of £94,823,000 after it was found to have overcharged broadband ISPs for Backhaul Extension Services (BES) between 2004/6 and 2011.

Openreach Statement – Why are we doing this?

The main changes being made by Openreach are in compliance with charge control requirements.

The pricing for some other ancillary services has not been updated for a few years, so it makes sense to update these at the same time, bearing in mind changes to the cost of providing these services over the period.

As usual it will be the responsibility of ISPs to decide whether they pass on these changes to their customers or absorb them. In reality the overall figure of £75m might sound like a lot but when spread out to cover millions of consumers it actually amounts to very little.

At the same time ISPs are having to invest in order to keep pace with new rules and capacity demands, thus many are perhaps more likely to absorb any decreases in order to maintain or perhaps improve their current level of service.