Openreach Backs Fibre Broadband Amendment to Renters Rights Bill
The CEO of Openreach, Clive Selley, has backed the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Barbara Janke after she proposed an amendment to the new Renters’ Rights Bill (RRB) that would allow tenants to request the right for a gigabit broadband installation, while ensuring that consent cannot be “unreasonably refused” by landlords (they’d get 28 days to make a decision).
The availability of gigabit broadband was mandated for new build homes in December 2022, but older properties – particularly large residential buildings (Multi-Dwelling Units) – still require network operators to secure the permission of freeholders before they can deploy new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines. This can become particularly tedious when landlords refuse access, fail to respond to a request, or where it’s unclear who the freeholder for a building actually is.
Openreach estimates that there are approximately 1,040,000 premises in such buildings across the country for which this issue applies and over 780,000 of those are said to be “at risk of no coverage from us or any other provider“, although it’s difficult to verify these figures.
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At present the RRB hands a lot of new rights to tenants (gov summary), including the right to request a pet in the property (alongside a supporting requirement for pet insurance). But it does not allow them to request an upgrade to faster broadband connectivity, and this can sometimes leave whole buildings and related tenants trapped on older copper lines.
Clive Selley said (Yorkshire Post – paywall):
“It is a huge number of people who could get full fibre because we have the infrastructure outside the building but we haven’t been able to secure the legal right to come into the building and do the plumbing. Fibre is thinner than a hair on a human head, the sheathing is white and when you put it against a white wall, if you are my age you can’t see it. Adding fibre is very, very non-intrusive, it is not like plumbing in a load of pipes.
A surprising number of blocks are owned by people who don’t live anywhere near – some are technically owned by a Post Office box in the British Virgin Islands. Often they are just overseas investors, sometimes in tax havens. Or they are just owned by landlords who don’t want the bother but it is denying renters the ability to get full fibre broadband and our commitment is to get that just about everywhere in the UK.”
However, there are of course two sides to every story, and this is not a new proposal. The previous Conservative Government rejected the idea because they feared that allowing broadband operators to enter premises without a landlord’s permission would “significantly and adversely impact on the rights of property owners and occupiers”.
The issue of automatic upgrade rights in MDUs sounds fair and logical, but rivals have already warned that this must not result in a situation that grants special access to Openreach – without also affording opponents a fair level of comparable accessibility. The latter could risk handing the incumbent an unfair competitive advantage (here), which is something the RRB must be careful to avoid.
In addition, property owners also have concerns that must be balanced in all this (i.e. insurance, damage to property, security, safety (e.g. fire, asbestos) and other liabilities etc.), which is because upgrading copper lines to fibre in MDUs is often a bit more involved than it may seem (it’s not always minor work) and not everybody may want that.
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Some landlords may also have exclusive agreements in place with rival network operators, which would be put at risk. Similarly, it’s also possible that some buildings may run into the same problem as we’ve seen in many UK streets over the past few years, with multiple operators trying to conduct work on the same site – causing a lot of disruption.
Suffice to say, network operators and the government are walking a bit of a tightrope in terms of the rights of freeholders and leaseholders, although it remains to be seen whether the proposed amendment gains enough support to be included in the final bill. But if it does, then it must be done in a fair and balanced way.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It’s such a self serving move by Openreach, make life impossible for competitors whilst making it look like you are being the good guys. Fact is that Openreach has its copper in nearly all multi occupancy buildings where landlord permission is required. So it is uniquely able to trigger its legacy customers to make these requests for Fibre service, locking out others. There is also more devil in the detail here. This is not the right way forward
Sorry that’s not correct. You’re implying that Openreach doesn’t need a wayleave while others do.
When Openreach needs to deploy fibre to an MDU, it does need to agree a legal wayleave for the building with the owner just like any other operator.
Under the communications act it cannot simply use legacy convention that it has had copper cabling to the building to enable its works.
The reason for this and why the communications act was very specific about legacy cabling is that It’s not just the right of access, the wayleave ensures that any works will comply with current building regs especially fire stopping requirements, whilst also protecting the telecoms operator from anyone removing their infrastructure once installed.
Openreach cannot and will not carry out any internal INTERNAL installation within an MDU without a wayleave in place.
No i am not implying that Openreach would not get a wayleave, what I am saying is that this proposal to change the law favours Openreach as it is more able because of its legacy positiion to get an existing
Tenant to make a request
It’s not self serving in the slightest. The bill amendment is plainly network agnostic, meaning any network builder could take advantage of it.
It’s actually self serving of altnets to block this as there’s no good reason to, unless of course they have no intention of building to many of these sites and would happily see Openreach thwarted and residents left behind.
If it were self-serving, Openreach would be pushing for two things:
1. A right of upgrade for your existing provider, rather than a right to FTTP installation. That way, Openreach could turn their copper monopoly into a fibre monopoly, using the law to keep competing FTTP providers out.
2. A limit of 1 FTTP provider per premises under this clause; that way, Openreach would be able to lock out other providers by leaping in whenever it thought there was a risk of another provider building out.
As it is, this clause would allow a tenant with access to Openreach FTTP to require their landlord to permit CityFibre (or another altnet) to build, and prevents the landlord from withholding permission unreasonably. That means that if Openreach have built FTTP to your MDU, but your tenants want a passing altnet to build to them, you can’t block on the basis that they have Openreach FTTP.
This is as far from self-serving as Openreach could get, short of a requirement that landlords subsidise FTTP installs from altnets without Ofcom SMP.
Thank goodness for living in Scotland we don’t have there leasehold issue regarding fibre in flats
Each tenant in each property changes ISP and needs a new ONT from one of the overbuilding suppliers. So not just a hairline fibre to a property but 3 or 4 possibly to each property and a distribution board of ONTs inside each property…….
There’s got to be a better solution: Maybe landlord supplied ethernet connection to each property and an ONT patch panel in the basement or ducting to each property that can have fibre easily replaced when swaps are made.
Two fibres to each flat installed by the management company in microducts so they can be blown back out again if needed, installation costs shared between the fibre providers that want to service the block and the tenants living there. Patched in a comms area into each networks splitters. ONTs in the flats so that each resident can see what the lights are doing and it’s coming off their power bill.
@Jonny
Agree, dark fibre from a central location to each apartment which all operators can patch in to would be the best solution, just the thorny question of who does it and who pays…..
I hope this goes through. Everybody should have the right to access the broadband provider of their choice.
So the landlord has 28 days to make a decision, which on the 28th day they reluctantly do, and then issue an instruction to their solicitor to go all slow and heavy on the wayleave paperwork, require insurances and undertakings that are not reasonable and then get bogged down probably leading to no resolution.
I recall the Duchy of Cornwall, landlord of a premise a few years back where a new leased line was needed, wanting an undertaking that no pornographic material would be permitted to be transferred over the communication service. Cue several months of delay whilst communications 101 was relayed to the Duchy of Cornwall legal team.
I tried to get fibre installed in a mdu from one of the alt nets. The cost of installing was prohibitive as the landlord wanted xxx money and the alt net could only afford xx.. So it didn’t happen.
We will have to wait for one of the big suppliers to run their fibre past the complex to see if they are willing to upgrade.
That being said The block does come with virgin media (HFC) pre installed.
Let’s see how it pans out.
I am not sure how long it will be before the work might possibly be completed in this small part in Elgin scotland as most of the place has FTTP just the maisonette building we are in that seems to of been missed off. Hoping something might be done this year to get FTTP