Gov Praises UK Broadband Sector for Creating 22,000 New Jobs

The UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has this afternoon praised broadband ISPs for helping to create more than 22,000 new jobs over the past year as “forecasts for gigabit rollout are revised further upwards,” which is an interesting statement coming so soon after the Government’s decision to downgrade their own coverage target.

The new statement was made after the PM and Digital Secretary, Oliver Dowden MP, met with the “biggest names in broadband” today to discuss their plans for the new state aid funded £5bn Project Gigabit strategy. The programme aims to ensure that 1Gbps speeds can reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, although the previous target for this date was to reach “every home.”

Certainly, it’s true to say that some of the largest commercial operators, such as Openreach (BT), Virgin Media and Cityfibre, have been busy creating thousands of new jobs to fuel their expanded network coverage ambitions over the past year. The Government and Ofcom have so far also helped to foster that through various positive changes to regulation, cutting red tape and other investment and voucher schemes etc.

However, we shouldn’t forget that a significant amount of job creation has come from the plethora of smaller alternative network (altnet) providers, which are also investing in similar work but were not part of today’s roundtable event (Summary of UK Full Fibre Build Progress). At the time of writing, it remains unclear whether today’s figure of 22,000 jobs has included the contribution from such players, which are busy investing billions into the market.

Oliver Dowden, Digital Secretary, said:

“Our plan to level up communities across the UK by giving them the fastest broadband on the planet is working. We’re now on track to connect 60 per cent of homes and businesses to gigabit speeds by the end of the year and I’m thrilled to see the tens of thousands of jobs being created as we build back better from the pandemic.

But we want to go further and faster, which is why today the Prime Minister and I sat down with the biggest names in broadband to discuss what more we can do together to end the battle over bandwidth.

It was a useful and constructive meeting where we emphasised our goal to speed up investment from our £5 billion Project Gigabit fund if providers can put forward workable plans to accelerate the delivery of lightning-fast connections for every part of the UK.”

Clive Selley CEO, Openreach, said:

“We are proud to be doing our part to provide the UK with world-class broadband. No-one else is building full fibre faster than us: 42,000 homes and businesses each week and we’ve just reached 4.5m in total. Thanks to the WFTMR we’ve secured the necessary investment from BT Group to deliver to 20million premises and we’ve built the team to deliver. Over the past two years, we’ve created more than 6,500 trainee engineering roles and recently announced an additional 2,500 direct jobs along with c.2,800 within our supply chain. This is more than any other builder.

Whilst we welcome the measures set out in Project Gigabit – and share the PM’s ambition – we’d like to see barriers tackled even more quickly. This will help us, and other builders, to go even further and faster.

In order for the UK to seize the huge potential of a world-class, gigabit-capable network Government needs to tackle some vested interests. One pressing issue is making it easier for fixed network builders to access blocks of flats and private lands. Reaching these premises is critical for levelling-up the country and building at pace. Whilst DCMS has now consulted on the Electronic Communications Code, we need to see bold changes implemented quickly.

Openreach is building in both urban and rural areas. It’s good to see that DCMS has started the procurement for the £5bn but we need to see it done quickly and with a focus on the quality of network build. If the sector is going to pass the Government’s 85% target and connect the hardest to reach parts of the country, vouchers also need to be available for people living in all rural exchanges areas.”

In a statement DCMS said that today’s event “came as the government upped its forecast for the proportion of homes and businesses with access to gigabit-capable connections by the end of the year from 50 per cent to 60 per cent.” Except Virgin Media’s ongoing plan to make 1Gbps speeds (DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade) available across their entire network by the end of 2021 meant that his was already somewhat of a long-expected outcome.

The other attendees at today’s event were Gigaclear, Sky Broadband (not building their own FTTP network), TalkTalk (no longer building their own FTTP network), Ofcom and Hyperoptic. But if the government are serious about wider engagement through the new gigabit programme then they really need to engage with operators from a much wider pool of this rapidly evolving sector.