BT Openreach Tweak and Reduce UK Ethernet Rental and Setup Prices

BTOpenreach has unveiled a string of “substantial price reductions” for their range of business focused Ethernet products, which includes the recently proposed plan to replace most of their Excess Construction Charges (ECC) for new Ethernet Access Direct (EAD) orders with a single connection fee of £548 +vat .

Openreach’s Excess Construction Charges cover the cost of either providing additional services or dealing with “situations where the normal cost of providing service is in excess of that listed within the Openreach price list“, which in some cases can add up to several thousand pounds extra to the installation cost of a new Ethernet service.

But earlier this month Ofcom gave preliminarily approval for Openreach to replace their sliding scale ECC’s (up to the first £2,800) with a connection fee of £548 +vat (effective from 1st June 2014), which means that customers whom would not have previously incurred any significant ECC’s will pay more while others would pay less. Ironically this is similar to how it was before the current ECCs were introduced.

On top of all that Openreach has also announced various price tweaks and reductions on the rental and connection charges across many of their Ethernet products (i.e. Ethernet Access Direct, Ethernet Backhaul Direct, WES/WEES and BES), specifically those that offer speeds between 10Mbps and 10Gbps.

Most of the changes also appear to reflect a 3 month delay in Ofcom’s Fixed Access Market Reviews and have been designed to balance against the new ECC connection charge. As a result many of the prices will be reduced on 1st April 2014 and then later increased to balance against the ECC flat rate fee from 1st June 2014.

But in other areas the ordinary rental fees have also been slashed. For example, the rental charge for EAD 1Gbit/s will be reduced by up to 16%, while the rental for EBD products will fall by around 30-35% (e.g. EBD 10Gbit/s ER Band C drops from £65,505 to £42,582) and a few others should see even more dramatic reductions. Look here for the Full List of Price Changes.

One small caveat is that Ofcom are still consulting on the new ECC connection charge (i.e. Leased Lines Charge Control measures) until 14th March, which means that another change may or may not be required in the future but for now the regulator appears to have accepted Openreach’s proposal.