Rising Copper Prices are a Double Edged Sword for UK Broadband

Last week the price per tonne of copper (Cu) bucked expectations by briefly reaching a new two year high of just over $6,500 (£5,074), which could act as a further incentive for UK telecoms operators to remove their old cables in favour of fibre optic (e.g. FTTP) infrastructure. If only it were so simple.

As one recent article in the Economist highlighted, the recent surge in the price of copper is unusual. Normally an economic downturn tends to result in a degree of often predictable choreography between gold and copper. On the one hand the price of gold will climb as investors seek a safe haven, while copper tends to dip due to a slowdown in manufacturing and construction.

The sharp economic shock caused by the COVID-19 pandemic did result in copper falling off a cliff, dropping from a peak of $6,300 in January to a low of just over $4,700 at the end of March 2020. But then something odd happened, despite lockdowns being introduced across much of the western world, the price of copper started climbing again and it has continued to do so.

In short, copper is suddenly behaving more like gold, although it’s still a long way from the last major peak in 2018 when it was worth over $7,300 per tonne (here).

Copper Price (Market Summary Over 3 Years)

All of this could be seen as representing good news for operators like KCOM and Openreach (BT), which are already beginning the long process of moving consumers from copper to Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband (example). However, physical removal of existing copper would be the final step in that process and is thus still quite a long way down the road (i.e. after everybody within an exchange area has been migrated to fibre).

The reality of Openreach’s move to retire, and then remove copper from their ducts, is that it will be gradual (taking many years to complete), following a pre-set plan as agreed with Ofcom. In other words, the annual movement(s) in the market value of copper itself is, today, perhaps less relevant to the operator than the desire to ensure a smooth and orderly platform transition to “full fibre” infrastructure.

Nevertheless, the value of that shiny red-orange metal is still an important consideration as it could help to cover some of the £12bn cost estimated for deploying full fibre infrastructure. Crucially there is a cost attached to the removal of copper itself and not all of their cables may be economically viable for extraction (they’re more likely to focus on the big core bundles of copper).

One estimate that we saw from Investec a few years ago suggested that BT’s copper (i.e. the bits that may actually be viable for removal), when adopting a price of around £5,000 per tonne, could be worth between £2.5bn to £5bn. As usual there are plenty of unknowns here, so take such figures with a pinch of salt.

The other caveat in the rising price of copper is that it will no doubt embolden Metal Theft against the operator’s network, which tends to cause untold misery (i.e. lengthy service outages) for homes and businesses in areas affected by such activity (i.e. Openreach’s copper being brutally ripped up out of the ground and sold to dodgy scrap merchants).

At this point some people often remark that Metal Theft is a good advert for advancing the deployment of optical fibre cables as a replacement (i.e. optical fibre is worth nothing to thieves), which is true except for one rather big caveat. Criminals often can’t identify whether or not a cable is copper or fibre, until after the damage has been caused.