Sky Broadband Consider FTTP Partnership with Virgin Media Sibling

UK ISP Sky Broadband (Comcast) is reportedly in talks with Liberty Global (Virgin Media) about investing in their new Joint Venture company Liberty Fibre Limited, which looks set to compete with Openreach (BT) in rural areas by building its own open access Gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

At present Sky has officially hooked-up its wagon to Openreach’s FTTP and G.fast based “ultrafast broadband” network, although they’ve also been courting interest from alternative network ISPs (here). Sky doesn’t want to build a full fibre network of its own but they are clearly interested in reaching as much of the United Kingdom as possible and at a competitive price, which requires working with a growing number of new networks.

On the flip side Virgin Media’s parent, Liberty Global, has been making plenty of noise (here and here) about its seeming intention to establish – alongside investment bank LionTree – an alternative network ISP in order to reach into the c.10 million UK premises that their existing ultrafast Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) cable and FTTP broadband network does not yet serve (e.g. rural areas, suburbs and smaller towns).

By establishing a second company, which Virgin Media could take a service from while still being a separate network (anchor tenant), then Liberty Global could extend their UK network while avoiding their main business being labelled by Ofcom as an operator with Significant Market Power (i.e. becoming subject to significant new regulation and enforced wholesale access, much like Openreach today).

Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, said (August 2019):

“So let’s just say that we are in the mix as we should be in any discussions about building the next wave of networks outside of where we already have built superfast broadband, we feel like our 15 million homes of 1Gbps ready, going to 10Gbps [in the future], is it for that footprint [Project Lighting].

But beyond that footprint, we’re going to be opportunistic to see if we can put capital to work off balance sheet without consolidating losses and activities. Potentially with partners, just to get Virgin possibly in the Virgin Media brand to a national scale, wouldn’t that be great, if Virgin was a national brand not a regional brand in half the marketplace.”

Mike also touched on this topic several more times last month, not least by saying that Liberty Global would be the “most important partner or platform” for anybody looking to tackle the “remaining 10 million homes.” Mike added that, “you should expect us to be exploring every alternative to creatively finance and participate in this expansion of broadband connectivity in the UK.”

Since then Liberty Global has officially established a new company called Liberty Fibre Ltd in the UK and, according to the FT (paywall), Sky has already opened talks with a view to supporting their efforts, which as above would be entirely in keeping with what the TV giant as already said. Likewise Sky is allegedly talking to Virgin Media about the possibility of wholesaling from their existing UK network (a big ask but Liberty Global is open to considering it).

All of this would also support Sky’s future plans to shift their TV service down broadband lines rather than via Satellite dishes, which is something that they’ve been able to test via their more limited NOW TV platform. So far Sky hasn’t yet done this for their main TV service in the United Kingdom. Equally Sky could just be using this as a means to pressure Openreach into giving them a better deal on FTTP.

In some respects Openreach has already responded by reducing their wholesale FTTP prices and they’re now preparing to launch two new packages – a 500Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1Gbps (115Mbps uploads) service – for the consumer market later this year (here). But no doubt Sky wants more than that and with 6 million broadband customers, as well as a health balance sheet, they can afford to play the game.

In the background to all this is Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s pledge to ensure that the country is completely covered by a full fibre network come 2025 (here), as well as the general hunger for investment in such infrastructure. Admittedly the 2025 target is massively unrealistic and the situation around Brexit means that the current Government may not last long enough to even put the necessary policy or funding in place (we’ll find out over the next couple of months).

Meanwhile Liberty Fibre Ltd is expected to put in a related application for Code Powers from Ofcom sometime within the next couple of weeks, which as a requirement will mean that they need to put their private ambition into the public domain. In other words, all of this is about to become much more official.