BDUK: Superfast Broadband Hits Super-Dense EU Buffers
The BDUK process has failed to deliver fibre competition. In that case, BT should open up all its new rural fibre, says Peter Judge
The day the discovery of the Higgs Boson is apparently announced, we are witnessing another experiment in fundamental science: the Irrestistible Force meeting the Immovable Object.
The government has put aside money towards getting rural areas of Britain connected to superfast fibre networks. These regions are uneconomic to wire up, so government money is needed. Unfortunately, the way the government wants to spend that money – even if it is the only way to do the job – won’t satisfy European regulations on competition.
Plenty of broadband options…
BT is already putting in a lot of fibre in a £2.5 billion upgrade for its Infinity fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) service, and Virgin is also rolling out fast fibre. But both are leaving a lot of gaps.
The government has given £530 million to Broadband Development UK, with the idea that local authorities can give this money out to any provider, large or small, that can provide the service local residents need.
This could be exciting, as the last few years have seen an explosion of community broadband efforts such as B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) which is digging its own fibre in Lancashire, and hopes to fund it by offering shares in the network it is producing.
Community-owned Rutland Telecom, meanwhile, raised £37,000 to get a fibre link to the cabinet in the village of Lyddington, after BT rejected the idea.
There is also a host of technology options, either extending copper in clever ways, or else using radio. FM spectrum has been suggested, as has “White Space” technology.
… but BT gets all the BDUK pie?
But despite all this, the eventual list of contractors getting BDUK money, came down to just two: BT and Fujitsu, which leads a consortium backed by Virgin and TalkTalk. Worse than this, Fujitsu only has two small bits of business, so essentially the whole thing has gone to BT, more or less.
What happened? Did BDUK expect this to happen all along, and was the whole devolved tendering structure just a smokescreen to try and make this look better to EU eyes? From Brussels, this much money to the dominant player looks like state aid, however intricately it is piped from source to benefactor.
And where did the altnet providers go? It seems they have been locked out by the difficulty of the BDUK process – a process that may well be deliberate and underhanded.
“The incumbents are not going to play fair,” Ian Grant of the Br0kenTeleph0n3 blog, told TechWeekEurope. “The BDUK process is indicative of the games they will encourage – make the entry criteria too high for most altnets, deny them access to essential information (e.g. street cabinet location and content, duct maps and condition reports), make PIA [Physical Infrastructure Access] too expensive to consider, make LLU rentals so high the altnet can’t compete, etc.”
If it really is the case that – through accident of design – only a big player can get into this space, then there is nothing that will placate EU objections. It looks like an irresistible force (the telecom giant) is meeting an immovable object (EU regulations).
Ofcom really doesn’t have the power to change much here, and the Department of Culture Media and Sport is trying to get some sort of compromise. But realistically, those two bodies scarcely look tough enough to get us past this deadlock.
In the end, there is one thing that might move things on, and that is to open up BT’s dark fibre.
Unbundle the BDUK fibres
The incumbent telco is going to resist this even harder than it resisted unbundling its local loop – a development which unblocked broadband and finally got decent DSL to the masses.
BT will say that its fibre network is its own asset, built with its own investment. But it clearly has to open up at some point, to meet the EU’s Digital Agenda and meet competitive guidelines.
Rural broadband offers an opportunity to force BT to start opening up its fibre to competitors, in a setting where it can’t object, and where it will not be losing out massively (remember, BT has said from the start, that there is not much business in these rural areas).
Ofcom and the DCMS should demand that any fibre installed with BDUK money should be unbundled from day one. The terms can be argued out, as they have with access to BT’s other ducts and poles. But if BT really is installing this as a favour to the rest of us, it shouldn’t mind sharing it properly.
BT makes shared fibre sound like the end of the world , but it won’t be, just as the Large Hadron Collider did not create a Black Hole.
If BT shares its BDUK fibre, and the sky doesn’t fall in, we can start sharing more of the network.
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