Radio Silence Aside – TalkTalk Still Aims for 3 Million FTTP Premises

Budget UK ISP TalkTalk has told ISPreview.co.uk that they still “plan to be at the heart of Britain’s full-fibre future” by deploying a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover 3 million premises, which follows nearly a year of almost complete silence since the project was unveiled.

Under the £1.5bn plan announced on 8th February 2018 (here), TalkTalk proposed to establish a new company (Infraco), which in turn would be 20% owned by TalkTalk and 80% by Infracapital (the infrastructure equity investment arm of M&G Prudential). The latter would contribute £400m and TalkTalk £100m (plus they expected take on c.£1bn in debt).

Since then there have been no truly significant updates on the project, aside from the appointment of a few bosses and a rumour that they might engage in a spot of passive infrastructure sharing with rival Virgin Media (here). The same cannot be said for their rivals, many of which have been busy announcing major roll-outs (Summary of UK Full Fibre Plans).

The radio silence has left some to wonder, ourselves included, whether or not TalkTalk’s own plans might have been overtaken or jeopardised by the rapidly rising ambitions of their rivals. After all it’s likely that the ISP would need to target many of the same urban areas, which is increasingly difficult when you have Openreach, Hyperoptic, Cityfibre / Vodafone, Community Fibre and others fighting over them too.

Nevertheless the provider remains adamant about their intention to reach 3 million premises.

A TalkTalk Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“TalkTalk plans to be at the heart of Britain’s full-fibre future. As the leading value-for-money provider, we want to ensure all our customers can access it at affordable prices.

We’ve outlined our commitment to roll-out full-fibre to three million homes via a new infrastructure company, and we have already appointed a new CEO and Chairman. We’ll provide further updates shortly.”

We think that TalkTalk would have done better to team-up with an existing project, much like they did in York (pictured top) with Cityfibre and initially Sky Broadband too as part of their city-wide FTTP deployment (here). This would have made a lot more sense, particularly given the known shortage of skilled telecoms engineers and the rising level of competitive build ambitions between operators.

Going it alone carries more risk today than it did a year ago. In addition, the more independent networks that emerge, the greater the potential for consumer confusion from lots of different “full fibre” services. This is one of several reasons why we eventually anticipate a flurry of consolidation as networks seek to grow and centralise through acquisition, but they of course have to actually build something first.

In any case all eyes will now be on TalkTalk’s forthcoming results announcement, which we hope will offer a more substantial update on their future FTTP plans, ideally including a solid time-scale for the deployment and perhaps even some information on which areas will be the first to benefit. The ISP is perhaps better placed than most to make a success of such a deployment but they can’t afford to linger for much longer.