Companies news September 2017
Reuters reported that Vodafone is considering investing in full fibre broadband connections if it can find partners to share costs; see this previous post for further background on this (in relation to Vodafone’s discussions with Openreach) and also this related Vodafone press release. Vodafone Germany announced a €2 billion investment in ultrafast fibre broadband services, expected to deliver around 13.7 million new gigabit connections to German consumers and enterprises. Also see commentary from the Telegraph.
ISP Review reported on the launch of legal proceedings by both Three and EE in relation to Ofcom’s forthcoming 4G and 5G spectrum auction. Three is calling for a tougher cap on the amount of spectrum that EE can own; EE is seeking to overturn Three’s challenge (further background on this here).
ISP Review also reported on complaints from mobile operators that they are unable to access BT’s network of ducts and poles in order to build new fibre backhaul links to support the deployment of future mobile broadband services. Ofcom had initially proposed that BT’s ducts and poles should be made available for any purpose but revised this in April 2017 (more here and here) on that basis that this could impact upon BT’s ability to recover its costs. Instead Ofcom proposed that BT’s ducts and poles could be utilised to lay fibre for consumers and large businesses, provided the purpose of the network is primarily to deliver broadband to homes and small offices, rather than to build a limited number of high value point-to-point leased line connections.
Other companies news this month:
- Gigaclear announced the award of a £90million contract to Complete Utilities to connect almost 70,000 properties across Herefordshire and Gloucestershire to its Ultrafast full fibre broadband network. The work comprises Phase 2 of the ongoing Fastershire project. Gigaclear also announced that worked had commenced to connect 21 communities in Devon and Somerset.
- CityFibre announced the connection of the first sites to its gigabit network in Stirling.
- Which? published results from its latest broadband survey which found that BT, Sky and TalkTalk performed particularly poorly for customer score (more on consumer broadband here).
