The road to full fibre

Fair and equal access to infrastructure that is already in the ground, so fibre builders don’t have to keep digging up the road and people’s fields when they don’t have to. The rules allowing fibre builders to use gas, electricity and water infrastructure to lay fibre need to be revised, and their scope broadened. Currently they aren’t workable. The Government has issued a call for evidence, which is a welcome step towards this. We need to see legislation follow quickly.

Fibre builders need a subsidy scheme to recruit and on-board the thousands of new staff this effort will need at pace. Openreach alone have estimated they may need to recruit at least 13,000 new engineers. CityFibre have also announced they believe they are going to recruit 10,000 new staff. We think that any government support should be conditional on that subsidised workforce being deployed in areas where full fibre is needed most – rural, remote areas.

We need all local authorities to allow, as standard use, the latest digging technology that means that fibre can be laid quickly and efficiently, and that simple things, like laying fibre across the front of a terraced house (rather than having to dig up the street) are, as a matter of course, permitted in planning terms.

The rules for getting planning consent and agreements to access land need to be changed. The industry needs the same rights as utilities such as the water industry who have a statutory right to build across land. Right now, the process of getting access for network builders significantly slows down deployment.

We must end the situation where BT and Virgin are actively penalised for investing in fibre, because they have to pay higher business rates on a fibre connection than they do on an older, much slower, copper one. This has major implications for the wider business case for full fibre investment.