Rural broadband providers welcome BT agreement to release data

Openreach to supply street cabinet data faster to ISPs

BT is to supply postcode data showing which street cabinets will be connected to phone exchanges with optical fibre, in a bid to encourage smaller ISPs to provide optical fibre services to rural areas.

This is something that smaller ISPs have been fighting for for some time, but until now BT has been unwilling to provide the data, perhaps because it wants to maintain its share of the broadband market.

Small ISP Rutland Telecom said on its blog yesterday: “[BT's infrastructure arm] BT Openreach has now agreed to supply data it has hitherto refused to give to Rutland Telecom to allow it to benefit rural broadband users.” Rutland Telecom said it had been pushing for this information for a year.

Rutland said: “The U-turn came in a meeting held in London between Rutland Telecom, BT Openreach, Ofcom, the Office of the Telecoms Adjudicator and some other operators looking to provide services to hard-to-reach areas.”

A spokeswoman for BT argued that this wasn't a U turn, saying: “This was a regular industry working group meeting normally attended by Ofcom and others. Ofcom provided input around a workable way to address some problems.”

Despite BT's concession, the data will not be made immediately accessible as it will take the company three months to prepare the Excel file containing the data. Rutland implied that this was an excessive delay: "This is actually a simple data export," it said.

BT’s spokeswoman said in response: “The extent of our fibre roll-out across the UK means that this is a major undertaking meaning it will be few months before this data is available.”

In the meantime, BT has agreed to supply the data region by region in response to requests from Rutland Telecom and other operators.