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NEWS BUSINESS
BT touts £6 billion ultrafast broadband investment
BT Group has outlined plans to invest billions on faster fixed and mobile broadband. Its
Openreach and EE businesses will between them spend around £6 billion in capital expenditure over the next three years. The plans include a renewed focus on fibre-to-the-
premises (FTTP), with the aim of reaching two million more premises, mainly in new housing developments, high streets and business parks. Openreach also said that it would deploy FTTP for free at sites with more than 100 new homes. The news follows further trials by BT’s
infrastructure business, Openreach, to demonstrate that it can reduce the cost of fibre deployment, improve the customer experience and make FTTP quicker to install. However, most BT customers can expect to
receive ultrafast broadband using G.fast technology, which will be deployed to a minimum of 10m properties in the same period, subject to regulatory support, with the ambition tof reaching 12m. BT Group chief executive Gavin Patterson said:
‘The UK is a digital leader today and it is vital that it remains one in the future. That is why we are
announcing a further £6 billion of investment in our UK networks, subject to regulatory certainty. He continued: ‘FTTP will also play a bigger role
going forward and I believe it is particularly well suited to those businesses who may need speeds of up to 1Gbps. My ambition is to roll it out to two million premises.’ More than 90 per cent of UK homes and
businesses can currently access superfast broadband – meaning headline speeds greater than 24Mb/s in this context – across all fixed networks, and that is set to rise to 95 per cent by the end of 2017. BT says this next wave of investment will help Openreach take UK superfast broadband coverage beyond 95 per cent. BT also said that it ‘stands ready to address slow
speeds in the final few per cent of the country’ but only ‘should there be regulatory support for its plans’. The operator has been developing ‘Long Reach VDSL’ in its laboratory at Martlesham Health, which could be a solution for those areas, and Openreach is set to run trials in the coming months. However, while it may compare favourably with the major European economies in terms of mid-speed
broadband deployment, the UK lags behind them in deployment of new fibre infrastructure. France and Spain have millions of FTTP subscribers, while the UK has just a few tens of thousands. Ronan Kelly, president of the FTTH Council
Europe and CTO for the EMEA and APAC regions at Adtran, praised the emphasis on FTTP. ‘It is no secret that the UK and other European countries have had to play catch up, and BT’s investment plan will accelerate the process. Leveraging existing network assets, BT’s approach will see the UK leapfrog many of its European peers as they wrestle with infrastructure replacement,’ he said. Nevertheless, BT is often criticised for continued
reliance on copper extension technologies such as VDSL and G.fast to achieve its objectives – and the latest announcement was no exception. Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre commented: ‘This
announcement is simply a reluctant response by a sluggish incumbent to the tightening noose of regulatory scrutiny. While intended to grab headlines on infrastructure commitment, BT’s announcement is largely signposting continued deployment of outmoded technology.’
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