Has BT opened the way to universal NGA broadband?

BT is to give rivals access to its ducts

Last week BT said it would open up its ducts and telegraph poles to competitors, and provide them with access to its “dark fibre” – the passive, high-capacity optical fibre needed to take data from BT’s street cabinets back to its phone exchanges.

The move could have significant implications for the rollout of next-generation access (NGA) networks, according to industry insiders.

Otpic network provider Geo’s chief executive, Chris Smedley, said: “Access to BT’s networks is likely to speed up widespread rollout by reducing the need for competitors to dig up streets. It will also lead to faster and better performing networks [as a result of increased competition].”

But perhaps most importantly for the government’s Digital Britain proposals, the solution is likely to improve competitive coverage to more remote areas as a result of ISPs being able to lay lines on top of BT’s infrastructure.

The unexpected announcement came in an interview with BT chief executive Ian Livingston by Financial Times reporter Andrew Parker.

According to a BT spokeswoman, the practicalities of the move have yet to be worked out in detail. “There’s still a lot of work to be done here, but [regulator] Ofcom is launching a consultation over the coming weeks to discuss exactly how allowing access to BT’s infrastructure would work in practice,” she said.

The debate about NGA optical fibre networks offering bandwidths of up to 100Mbit/s has been re-energised in other ways in past weeks. The Conservative Party recently made a statement detailing how it would implement NGA, and other aspects of the government’s Digital Britain report, published last year.

The Tories said they would force BT to open up its infrastructure and also investigate whether other water, electricity and gas infrastructures could be used for NGA rollouts. The Conservatives also said they would use £200m from the digital TV switchover pot to ensure remote rural areas can receive broadband of at least 2Mbit/s.

However, industry body the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s chief executive Antony Walker argued that having access to BT’s infrastructure would be unlikely to start a stampede of competing fibre rollouts.

“Our view is that duct, pole and dark fibre access would be part of the toolkit for delivering efficient NGA, but not the total answer,” said Walker. “There is still a lot of work required to turn ‘duct access’ into a set of products that industry players can roll out.”

The “work” referred to by Walker will raise important issues that would need to be hammered out by Ofcom.

BT would charge competitors for laying fibre in its ducts – so pricing will be a major issue. Another issue will be whether there would actually be space in the duct for additional fibre connections – this is not known as there has never been a full survey of the BT network. Also, if there is space in the duct, deciding who gets access to it first is another potential sticking point.

A complete survey of BT’s ducts would be impractical and cost too much, said Walker. “The industry will need to come to an agreement on the process by which operators can get information about a particular network route,” he added.