BT Reveals Duct And Pole Sharing Charges

BT’s wholesale arm, Openreach, has today announced the draft pricing and design proposals for its duct and pole sharing products, which will allow other operators to deliver last mile broadband services to homes and businesses in the UK.

Communications providers will be able to rent space in BT’s underground ducts from £0.95 per metre per year, and Openreach is also proposing an indicative pole sharing price of £21.00 per pole attachment. The company claims that the duct charges are approximately 15 percent below the average price across France, Spain, Portugal and Germany.

“Although we don’t view duct and pole sharing as the silver bullet to get fibre to every premises in the UK, these new products represent a positive step, opening our infrastructure to supply industry with an even wider range of different mechanisms for delivering fibre broadband,” said Steve Robertson, CEO of Openreach. “We also think it’s really important that consumers and businesses continue to enjoy a choice of fibre services so we will be expecting others to be as open as we are.”

BT ordered to open ducts

In October 2010, the regulator Ofcom ordered BT to open up its fibre network to rival Internet service providers (ISPs), such as TalkTalk and BSkyB, in an attempt to hasten the rollout of super-fast broadband throughout the country. BT does already provide access options to its fibre network, but BT said the Ofcom statement was designed to provide “regulatory clarity and certainty”.

Openreach still expects that its Generic Ethernet Access (GEA) product – which is the fibre equivalent of local loop unbundling (LLU) – will form the basis of most ISPs’ fibre offerings. However, duct and pole sharing could play an important role in bringing faster broadband speeds to rural areas, according to the company.

Last year, the government pledged to invest £530 million in the improvement of the UK’s broadband infrastructure. This is on top of the £2.5 billion pledged by BT to roll out fibre to around two thirds of UK homes by 2015. Much of this investment will fund superfast broadband in areas of the country that are not commercially viable for operators to reach.

Rural broadband

BT recently announced six winners of its Race to Infinity broadband promotion, designed to drum up interest in the operator’s fibre broadband products in rural areas. The winning exchanges were Baschurch in Shropshire, Blewbury in Oxfordshire, Caxton in Cambridgeshire, Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders, Madingley in Cambridgeshire and Whitchurch in Hampshire. BT has said it will upgrade the exchanges of the winning areas to receive fibre broadband by early 2012.

The company also yesterday named a further 41 market towns that will receive high-speed fibre broadband connections of up to 40Mbps by spring 2012. “An infrastructure project on this scale — arguably as important to the future of the UK as the road or rail networks — can only be done in partnership,” said Robertson.