Examining the Lack of Gigabit Broadband in Some UK Urban Areas

Most people tend to assume that the problem of slow broadband ISP connectivity is one that predominantly affects rural areas, which is matched by a presumption that commercial operators (Openreach, Virgin Media etc.) will quickly blanket big UK cities and towns with the fastest speeds. But such assumptions are not always correct.

During the many incarnations of Disney’s famous Beauty and the Beast ™, there’s a moment where the lead actress – Bella – strikes up a song and opens with the famous line, “Tale as old as time..“. But it’s usually at this point, while trying not to fall asleep and risk incurring the ire of my daughter, when I’m bizarrely reminded of some old misconceptions around broadband availability in urban areas.

Granted, I need to get out more, but this is an issue you’ll soon be hearing more about, and it’s thus worthy of a little exploration. The last time ISPreview really covered it in any depth was during the latter stages of Openreach’s rollout of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) technology, when a similar problem existed (i.e. dense urban areas were being missed). But the same issue looks set to return for the gigabit era.

The problem is easy enough to see. For example, data from Thinkbroadband (supplied last October) reveals that well over 60,000 premises across London‘s various boroughs are still only able to get online via a slow copper ADSL broadband line, which increases to around 800,000 when you look at premises where the fastest available network is via FTTC (i.e. no gigabit solutions).

A similar story can be found in other cities, such as Manchester, where around 8,700 premises only have access to ADSL, rising to 54,242 premises for those with FTTC as the best option. Some of these patches (or islands) of poor connectivity can even be found in dense central city areas, which are perhaps one of the last places you’d expect to find them (i.e. plenty of potential customers and all packed into an enticingly small geographic area).

Mind the gap

Readers often ask us why locations like this end up being missed out, particularly when all the signs suggest that they should make for ripe pickings amongst aggressively competitive commercial players. We’ve published a simplified list to explain some of the reasons why this occurs, which haven’t changed much since the last time we looked a decade ago.

Obstacles to Dense Urban Gigabit Broadband Builds

➤ No recourse to public funding.

Rural areas that are identified as being the subject of market failure (i.e. too expensive for commercial investment alone to reach) can often benefit from various government voucher schemes and state aid style subsidies, but the same is not true for urban areas.

State aid rules and related value for money exercises often conclude, understandably, that dense urban locations should be upgradable using private funding – without recourse to public investment. Using public money might also be considered anti-competitive in an environment where several operators are likely to be playing.

In the past the UK Government did manage to skate around some of this by launching a Connection Voucher scheme that worked in semi-urban areas (i.e. grants to help homes/businesses get a better connection installed). But that has since been re-focused to become a rural centric scheme, which overlooks the fact that some dense urban areas continue to be left at a digital disadvantage.

➤ A question of ownership.

In some areas it can become very difficult to deploy a new street cabinet or other infrastructure because the ownership of the pavement itself may not be as clear as you would have hoped. But even if you can figure out who owns what and where (public or private land), then there’s also the issue of wayleaves (below).

➤ Wayleave agreements are still challenging (legal property / land access).

At present it can still be tricky for operators to access and upgrade existing infrastructure inside large residential buildings (Multi-Dwelling Units) and on telecoms poles. The Telecommunications Infrastructure (Leasehold Property) Act 2021 was designed to help tackle the problem of unresponsive landlords (here), but it didn’t resolve everything.

Further tweaks are now being made via the new Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act (PSTI) – here, such as by giving telecoms operators easier access to telegraph poles on private land (public land is not an issue). But it will take time to fully introduce all that. This will also not fully resolve some lingering issues with MDU access (large blocks of flats/apartments – known as Multi-Dwelling Units), which tend to be concentrated in city-centre areas.

For example, operators still face numerous challenges when they try and negotiate access to these properties, including many cases where landlords are totally unresponsive to repeated efforts to start negotiations. In other cases, landlords will be responsive, but operators will struggle to negotiate a mutually acceptable agreement. As above, some of this may be resolved by the new laws, but not all of it and showing a repeated lack of responsiveness by a landlord itself still takes a lot of time.

The MP for Barnsley East, Stephanie Peacock, noted in parliament last year that operators find some of the terms are unnecessarily onerous. For example, they have questioned the need to send a notice by recorded delivery when all previous attempts to make contact have been ignored or rejected, and when many contact addresses for grantors are simply overseas PO boxes. Others have said that they will find it hard to line up permissions, such as those needed from the local authority and those needed for preserving heritage, at the same time.

One catch here is that, by the time access to a nearby MDU has been secured, the build teams have often moved on from the area – it’s naturally fastest and most cost efficient if you can hook-up such buildings when your civil engineering teams are already active just outside the building. Failing to get this right can leave some areas poorly served for a very long time.

In fairness, MDU owners do have concerns too, such as in respect to building insurance, health and safety, damage to the property and so forth. Furthermore, some solutions to these problems might risk handing a commercial benefit to specific operators with a lot of MDUs that need upgrading, such as Openreach.

Suffice to say that issues with securing wayleaves can still be a problem in dense urban areas, which can obstruct the ability to upgrade an existing network or deploy new fibre.

➤ Unexpected build challenges.

Operators trying to build fibre into dense urban areas, such as city centres, can sometimes run into problems due to the existence of old coal cellars / basements, significant congestion of older cable ducts and narrow roads (i.e. no extended curtilage). Such issues can make digging new trenches and toby boxes extremely challenging or even impossible. Resolving this takes a lot of time and money, which may cause some operators to shelve or skip such deployments.

➤ Permits and road closures.

The risk of road closures is also given more significance in city centre areas, where such things can cause significant disruption to travel (e.g. the morning and afternoon rush hour) and thus require much more care and consideration to avoid uproar from residents. Getting the permits to do such work also remains a generally slow and harder process in urban areas.

The Government itself notes that road and street works comprise 70% of the cost of fixed-line network deployment, thus making reforms to the streetworks regulations would be beneficial/support network rollout, particularly if a proper flexi permit scheme was introduced. At present, operators have to obtain a permit for each street where works take place, which creates a significant administrative burden.

Just to give this some more context. Openreach and other operators have helped to pilot alternative flexi-permits where they or network builders can apply to local authorities for a single permit covering a wide geographical area instead of numerous separate street applications. Trials have shown these can significantly reduce the time it takes to roll out networks across a planned area of build.

➤ Exchange Only Lines.

In the past it was often assumed that one of the biggest reasons why some city areas still only have a choice of ADSL is because they were traditionally served by Exchange Only Lines (EoL). In an EOL setup the copper phone line for a home or business is connected directly to a telephone exchange and does not go through a local Street Cabinet. Upgrading these to FTTC requires a complex and costly network rearrangement.

However, it’s not uncommon for the remaining EoLs to exist in areas affected by some of the other aforementioned obstacles, which also helps to explain why FTTP builds may be harder to complete in such locations. Suffice to say that if you’re still living in an urban EoL area, then it could probably be taken as an indication of other challenges preventing deployment of FTTP.

This also means that EoLs themselves are somewhat of a red herring when it comes to FTTP build, since they’re a sympton rather than the cause of a wider problem.

➤ Labour / workforce shortages.

The country is continuing to suffer from a shortage of fibre engineers and, while this does not physically relate to the prevention of build in urban areas, it does certainly have an impact on the pace at which it can be resolved.

The government are working to implement a visa waiver (e.g. adding telecoms engineers to their Short Occupation List) that might make it easier to hire additional skilled engineers from abroad (here), but this probably won’t be implemented until around the autumn of this year.

The good news is that the Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit programme might finally be starting to recognise the problem. Officially, this project is adopting an “outside-in” approach to build (i.e. rural areas come first) and is intended to help upgrade those rural and semi-rural areas in the final 20% (5-6 million premises) of the UK that aren’t expected to benefit from commercial deployments over the next 3 years.

However, it’s an unavoidable reality that some of the final 20% will also come from urban areas, and the government has already indicated that they’re keen to understand the scale of this issue. As part of that, the Building Digital UK team, which is the executive agency that oversees Project Gigabit, launched a number of Public Reviews (PR) for big urban regions to help identify the limitations of planned commercial deployments (here).

The reviews preliminarily noted that commercial coverage of gigabit-capable broadband would NOT reach 1,704,232 premises in Greater London (Lot 37) over the next 3 years, which shrinks to 569,694 premises for Merseyside and Greater Manchester (Lot 36), then 208,438 premises for Birmingham and the Black Country (Lot 35) and 71,441 premises in the Newcastle and North Tyneside (Lot 38) region.

Suffice to say, there’s a big gap that will need filling in cities too, and we expect more reviews to follow in the future because being able to identify market failure in urban areas is the first step toward a solution. On the other hand, it’s unclear how they plan to resolve such issues, which could raise concerns over the use of a potentially anticompetitive market subsidy.