Cityfibre to Consult on UK Copper Lines to Full Fibre Switchover

Full fibre and broadband ISP network builder Cityfibre has decided that the debate over moving from old copper lines to new “full fibre” (FTTP) ones shouldn’t just be focused upon Openreach (BT). As a result the operator has proposed to conduct an industry-wide consultation to examine how alternative network providers can help.

At present most of the talk around shifting customers and services from slower copper to ultrafast fibre optic lines (i.e. long-term it makes no sense to keep maintaining an old legacy network alongside fibre) has tended to centre around Openreach, which is hardly surprising since they control most of the national copper. Meanwhile KCOM has a smaller consideration in East Yorkshire, while Virgin Media’s Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) still has a fair bit of life left.

Openreach is currently preparing to test such a shift via an Exchange Upgrade Trial (here and here) in Salisbury (Wiltshire), which is in no small part because they intend to complete their £8m FTTP deployment to all 20,000 premises across the cathedral city by April 2020 (here). Likewise KCOM has now covered the whole of Hull with a similar network (here) and that puts them in a prime position to switch-off their old copper lines.

In keeping with that Cityfibre’s consultation is said to have been triggered by their “Gigabit City” FTTP rollout – supported by UK ISP partner Vodafone – in the Scottish city of Stirling (here), which they claim “will be the first city in the UK ready for a copper to fibre switch-over” in summer 2020 (we assume they’ve ignored Hull and Salisbury for a reason).

Cityfibre said they will commence an industry-wide consultation in the coming weeks, providing ISPs of all sizes an opportunity to stipulate what provisions would be required to support all legacy services on the new networks, what the process should be for mass migration of customers, and what steps are needed to ensure easy and hassle-free switching for consumers.

The consultation will be undertaken by Assembly Research, an independent London-based analyst firm specialising in communications markets.

Greg Mesch, CEO at Cityfibre, said:

“Only by collaborating as an industry, with the full support of Government and Ofcom, will we be able to switch-over the UK from legacy copper networks to a future-proof full fibre platform. Our consultation will ensure that we play our part in this switch-over and that the eventual retirement of the copper networks is managed in a way that promotes sustained infrastructure investment from a range of organisations.

With rollouts underway to reach over 20% of the UK market, our city-wide full fibre networks like that in Stirling will soon be of sufficient coverage to play their part, enabling a copper to fibre switch-over for the benefit of Communication Providers and their customers. Through our consultation, we look forward to engaging with the whole industry, including Openreach and BT Retail, to help develop a national plan to efficiently and smoothly upgrade Britain.”

We think this is a good move since the voices of altnet ISPs does tend to be drowned out by the wider debate over Openreach’s plans. Nevertheless many altnet providers are building Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks of their own and so it makes perfect sense to be considering how such a switch-over might affect those networks too, not least where they could benefit by potentially peeling off customers from the incumbent.

One challenge here will come from the difficulty of getting so many different ISPs on-board with a shared strategy, particularly since many of the most established players tend to only take their services from Openreach’s network; diversifying out to harness different platforms is a complicated challenge (at the wholesale level such setups can be very different in terms of service, contracts and prices).

On the other hand if rival networks prove to be as successful as the more established ones then sooner or later ISPs, particularly those that merely piggyback off major infrastructure players, may have little choice but to adapt in order to cover as much of the market as possible.

Obviously Cityfibre aims to be in a prime position with their £2.5bn strategy to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes and businesses in 12 cities and towns by the end of 2021 and then 5 million premises across 37 cities and towns by the end of 2025 (here). We note that today’s announcement actually states they’ll cover “over 60 towns and cities, contributing more than 20% of the target and creating the UK’s third digital network of scale.”

Cityfibre obviously can’t switch-off any copper itself as they don’t have any, which is why the talk above is of the “switch-over,” even though it all feeds into the same goal. Lest we forget that they also own business ISP Entanet, which still has Openreach/BT lines to consider.