The cross-party British Infrastructure Group (BIG), which is led by Grant Shapps (Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield), will next week publish their new Broadbad 2.0 report that is expected to highlight a number of problems with the state of broadband in the UK and call for improvements.
Shapps released his first Broadbad 1.0 report over a year ago (January 2016), which claimed to have identified “large inconsistencies in service leading to millions of citizens and businesses experiencing slow or non-existent connections.” In short, the report pinned most of the blame for this on BT.
The original report warned that the United Kingdom’s broadband connectivity was being “held back by systemic underinvestment stemming from the ‘natural monopoly’ of BT and Openreach“, which it claimed was “stifling competition, hurting our constituents and in the process limiting Britain’s business and economic potential.”
Suffice to say that Shapps supported calls for the full separation of Openreach from BT, although the operator itself responded by describing his recommendations as “misleading and ill-judged” (here). BT also pointed out that the coverage of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) connectivity in the UK is better than most EU countries (example).
Today around 92-93% of premises are within reach of a fixed line superfast broadband service but there’s still plenty of work left to do in order to reach the next target of 97% by 2020, with the final 3% expected to be catered for via a legally-binding 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO); 10Mbps being the minimum speed, not a maximum. The USO may very well end up being funded by BT and KCOM (here).
Since then Ofcom and BT have reached a voluntary agreement over Openreach’s “legal separation.” The operator’s network access division is also being forced to comply with higher quality standards, as well as measures to open up more of their network to rivals and various other changes (here, here and here).
Separately Openreach are consulting on the possibility of deploying 1Gbps “full fibre” FTTP broadband to cover 10 million premises by around 2025 (here), which is a lot more than the 2 million currently planned for 2020. On top of that they also intend to deploy ‘up to’ 330Mbps G.fast to 10 million premises by 2020. This is before we consider Virgin Media’s expansion to cover 60-65% of the UK and all the work being done by AltNets.
In that sense it will be interesting to see whether tomorrow’s report paints a more optimistic picture of the future or instead focuses on criticising the current market, while possibly failing to set out a detailed model for solving some of the identified problems.
Shapps is already on record as saying that more must be done to tackle those who are still stuck with slow broadband speeds, especially in rural areas. Indeed it would be good if the Government did at least adopt a solid commitment and time-scale for 100% coverage of superfast broadband, which is something that almost every other EU country has done (this is not to be confused with the USO).
We’ll update this article tomorrow morning or as soon as the report has been published (it’s currently unclear whether this is over the weekend or next week).
UPDATE 22nd July 2017
Grant’s PR team informs us that the report is due to be published next Saturday.
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