Broadband bills may soar to fund network upgrade

MILLIONS of households could be stung by higher bills as part of plans to upgrade Britain’s broadband network.

BT’s network arm, Openreach, yesterday said it could give 10million homes cutting- edge internet connections by the mid-2020s – but only if it was allowed to claw back costs from customers.

It said the work was likely to cost between £3billion and £6billion and suggested this should be ‘spread fairly’ across a range of customers.

This could mean even those customers who don’t benefit could be asked to foot some of the costs.

Openreach believes the upgrade would make connections more reliable and be necessary for future technologies.

A typical broadband package provided by BT currently gives speeds of up to 17mbps for £29.99 a month. The planned cables would be able to provide speeds of 1,000mbps.

Clive Selley, Openreach’s chief executive, said the benefits from better broadband ‘could be huge’ but added: ‘We need to agree how the costs of such a huge engineering project can be recovered fairly from all those that stand to benefit.’

Openreach is responsible for the cables that connect most homes to the internet and phone lines. The company is under pressure to roll out so- called ‘full-fibre’ connections, where modern cables would run into homes and offices.

At the moment, fibre cables only go as far as street cabinets, with Victorian-era copper cables used for the last stretch to people’s homes.

The proposals put forward yesterday would involve replacing these copper wires with fibre cables.

After consulting with internet providers this summer, Openreach said there was broad support for the work and that it should be part of a major switchover program.

Openreach said charging a broader number of customers for the upgrade would allow it to keep price increases down.

It added: ‘A large-scale [full-fibre] network is likely to benefit a broad set of customers over time, so Openreach believes the costs should be spread fairly across a broad customer base to reflect that.’

But it admitted there were concerns that customers may not be willing to pay more just to get the same speeds through better wires.

Last night an industry source warned the plan could mean ‘prices being raised across the board’.