BARRY COLLINS
Barry is yet to see a sensible plan to meet the government’s fibre broadband targets
Barry is yet to see a sensible plan to meet the government’s fibre broadband targets.
Six days. Six sodding days of grinding, thumping, scraping, banging, clanging, swearing and engines revving is what it took Virgin Media to dig up 100 yards of our road to install fibre. If Virgin Media had been digging trenches during the war, I’d be getting my broadband from Deutsche Telekom by now.
However, the Saturday morning pneumatic-drill wake-up call might just have been worth it, as I’m now one of the mere 10% to have the option of a full-fibre connection. The rest of you saps? Join the queue, because a nightmarish combination of Boris, Ofcom, Openreach and a handful of other major players are trying to work out how we might get the remaining 90% of the UK sorted. Holding your breath is definitely not recommended.
Let’s start with the government. Boris, you may recall, peppered his pre-election interviews with the promise of delivering full-fat fibre to everyone by 2025. And in case for some reason you didn’t believe him, it’s right there in the manifesto too: “We intend to bring full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025,” it said. (The promise of full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband is curious – surely one leads to the other – but let’s just assume Dominic Cummings had a brain fart and meant “or” instead of “and”.)
You may be shocked to hear that the pledge was a little light on detail, aside from mention of “£5 billion in funding already promised” and an intention to “provide greater mobile coverage across the country”. How far will £5 billion get you? Well, if you started in the north of Scotland,it wouldn’t even get you past Hadrian’s Wall. In 2018, the government’s own Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review estimated it would cost “in the region of £30 billion” to cover the entire country. Boris appears to be banking on widespread 5G to save his bacon, which has many of the same problems as fibre – it’s likely to be rolled out in the cities but is brutally expensive to install in outer suburbia.
Ofcom is clearly getting leant on, too. In early January, it put out a press release titled “Supercharging investment in fibre broadband”, which was remarkable only in that it made no mention of new investment in fibre.
Instead, it was a collection of
Ofcom’s Greatest Hits from the past ten years of dismal fibre-to-thepremises growth: talk of opening up BT’s telegraph poles and underground ducts for other fibre providers (a re-release of a track from 2005), fiddling with the regulated wholesale charges imposed on Openreach (a catchy B-side from 2007), a promise to help Openreach close the copper telephone network to reduce its costs (yes, this is 2020).
“These plans will help fuel a fullfibre future for the whole country,” said Ofcom’s interim chief executive, Jonathan Oxley. “We’re removing the remaining roadblocks to investment and supporting competition, so companies can build the networks that will drive the UK into the digital fast lane.” With this kind of nonannouncement dressed up as a breakthrough, as Ofcom is famed for, he can look forward to removing the “interim” from his title any day now.
Which leaves us back pretty much where we started: in the hands of the telecoms companies. As published in Ofcom’s recent market review, BT plans to reach 15 million homes with full fibre by the middle of this decade. Virgin will get to 17 million – although a high proportion of those will be on coaxial cable, not full fibre, and
Virgin’s DOCSIS-based system means upload speeds are relatively risible (think 50Mbits/sec uploads on a gigabit downstream line). CityFibre plans to reach five million and FibreNation a further three million.
Those four add up to 40 million, which sounds great considering there are 27 million homes in the UK, according to the latest figures I could find from the Office of National Statistics. But there’s huge overlap in those networks – and it’s largely in the cities,which are the cheapest to cover.
So will Britain be full fibre by
2025? There are glimmers of hope. Liberty Global – Virgin Media’s parent company – is planning to roll out an Openreach-like network of its own, over which it would lease capacity to other providers as well as Virgin. Sky is reportedly interested in joining that, which shows you just how much the sands are shifting when those two big rivals are working as one.
Sadly, I reckon there’s more chance of of Piers Morgan discovering humility than a full fibre network being ready by 2025. On the plus side, your weekend lie-ins are safe. barry@bigtechquestion.com
How far will £5 billion get you? Well, if you started in the north of Scotland, it wouldn’t even get you past Hadrian’s Wall
Sadly, I reckon there’s more chance of Piers Morgan discovering humility than a full-fibre network being ready by 2025