Telecoms giant Openreach (BT) has just published their first ever Annual Review 2017/18, which charts both their national network deployment progress and the many internal changes they’ve had to make over the past 12 months (mostly as a result of regulatory changes from Ofcom and the Government).
Regular readers of ISPreview.co.uk won’t find anything terribly new or surprising inside the somewhat promotional report, which largely summarises information and developments that already exist in the public domain. Nevertheless it’s a useful summary for the uninitiated and there are plenty of big statistics to chew threw.
For example, Openreach claims to have now built a total of 97,000 street cabinets (not all FTTC ones of course), as well as 5,600 exchange buildings and their network is said to be 165 million kilometres long. The network itself serves 32 million premises and is supported by 30,400 engineers.
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The operator also claims to have “halted and reversed a six-year rise in the total number of faults on our network,” which they achieved by investing more than £30m into proactive maintenance (i.e. saving 175,000 engineering visits last year – because “we were fixing faults before our CP customers even reported them to us“). More money will be going toward this next year.
On the financial front their revenue has remained flat and operating profit was down 7%, although this has to be balanced against around £230m worth of regulatory price changes. Meanwhile capital expenditure was £1,573m, up £126m or 9% (2015/16: up £365m or 34%) “reflecting our ongoing investment in fibre coverage and speed, and the delivery of more complex Ethernet circuits.”
Openreach adds that the above “was after gross grant income of £159m (2015/16: £320m) directly related to our activity on the Broadband Delivery UK programme build and offset by the deferral of £185m of the total grant income (2015/16: £227m) due to strong levels of fibre broadband take-up” (i.e. gainshare / clawback from the state aid supported superfast broadband rollout contracts).
Mike McTighe, Openreach Chairman, said:
“This year we continued to grow our superfast broadband network.
Today it delivers speeds of at least 24 Mbps to more than 27.5 million premises. We were proud to do the heavy lifting on the Government’s commitment to make superfast available to 95% of UK homes and businesses by the end of 2017.
This is no mean feat. Few countries around the world can point to such a widespread superfast footprint. But everyone in Britain should be able to get decent broadband speeds and we’re still 5% short of good enough.
We won’t stop until we close the gap. And we fully support the Government’s objective to deliver a [10Mbps] Universal Service Obligation.
Having achieved such widespread access to superfast broadband, it’s right that we shift our focus to the next generation of ultrafast (100+ Mbps) infrastructure.
Let me be clear – we believe in a full fibre future. In fact I think a future-proofed digital network is essential to the UK’s productivity and prosperity – it will serve Britain’s people and businesses for decades to come. So we need to develop a viable business case which makes that possible.
This year we’ve made big progress – honing our skills, tools and techniques, taking our overall ultrafast footprint to more than 1.5 million homes and businesses using FTTP and Gfast technologies. Having consulted our Communications Providers customers during the summer, we now have an accelerated plan to make full fibre/FTTP connections available to 3 million homes and businesses by the end of 2020.
But we want to go a lot further – to 10 million premises and ultimately most of the UK if the business case is feasible. So we now have a Fibre First approach to every network expansion decision we make.
We’ve begun work in eight major cities and I firmly believe that with the right conditions we can reach 10 million premises by the mid-2020s and the majority of the UK thereafter. We’ve also continued to develop technologies that will help us deliver ultrafast connectivity to people quickly and cost effectively.”
The full report can be downloaded below.
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Openreach Annual Review 2017/18
https://www.homeandbusiness.openreach.co.uk../annual-review-and-report
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