Crn21 1200 300.jpeg

Openreach splitting from BT would benefit resellers, claims TalkTalk

TalkTalk, Sky and Vodafone form campaign calling for a complete split of Openreach from parent company BT following Ofcom ruling

Channel partners are unable to provide internet services in short timeframes because of Openreach's association with BT, according to rival TalkTalk.

Alongside Sky and Vodafone, TalkTalk is part of a new campaign, Fix Britain's Internet, calling for Openreach to completely split from parent company BT.

The campaign was founded for the 10-week consultation period held by Ofcom to assess plans to make Openreach a separate company within BT.

The Fix Britain's Internet campaign asserts that Openreach's status as a part of BT has meant that it is not receiving enough funding to improve services, and would be better placed to invest in the network if it were a separate entity.

Alexandra Tempest (pictured right), director of partners at TalkTalk, said: "BT has been finding loopholes in the Openreach regulation for over a decade now. At the moment their investment is going elsewhere. I think Ofcom uncovered that there were about £4bn in excess profits over the last 10 to 12 years that BT has had Openreach.

"That was never the reason Openreach was set up, to be a profit centre. Profits are going into the group and I believe Openreach is not getting its share of the profits to invest in the network. Without investing in the network they are challenged in terms of providing core speeds in certain areas of the UK. They need to be able to choose how they invest their own profits and how they put out disruptive technology that we can all consume. At the moment that is not happening."

Tempest said that of the 800 to 850 channel partners she works with, "without a doubt every single one of them has this as a challenge."

"Without fail Openreach is at the top of every single list of talking points a partner will bring to me," she explained. "That is because they really struggle with the underinvestment in the national broadband network. They are really challenged by very long installation times, the quality of service is poor, networks aren't invested in, and they find it difficult to be able to articulate to an end customer why this is down to one particular organisation."

Channel partners would be able to reduce the timescales for their services and offer a much broader range of services to their end users if "proper" investment and innovation was done on the networks, according to Tempest.

"Unless we put the proper investment in our infrastructure, unless we make them accountable, as a separate company, we can't leverage it and we are really losing out," she added. "For Openreach to do as well as it could, it needs to be a separate organisation and it needs to be in charge of its own destiny."

Network provider Gamma's chief operating officer Richard Bligh agreed that Openreach may be better completely seperate from BT, but doesn't believe it "as strongly as other operators".

"We can see certain benefits to it staying in BT. The thing we were very keen on was financial separation. So if Openreach generates cash, it goes back into high-speed broadband, not into some other part of the group to do something else. If it is clean and clear and separate then there are no issues," he said.

"We must not lose track of what it is all about, and that is to get Openreach to provide a better service to businesses and consumers. It's about doing it better for more people."

Fix Britain's Internet's website states that "BT is spending millions buying the rights for televised football, rather than investing this money in Britain's infrastructure".

A BT representative said: ""We are disappointed by the false claims that underpin this campaign. In particular, it is outrageous to claim that BT spends more on football rights than on Openreach when the opposite is so clearly the case. Openreach is one of the best-funded local network businesses in the world. It has been investing more than £1bn a year on average over the past decade and that has risen to around £1.4bn. That is roughly double the amount that our consumer business chooses to spend on football rights out of its own free cashflow.

"We recognise there are homes and businesses that need faster broadband and we have plans to reach them. We mustn't lose sight, however, of the fact that nine out of 10 premises can access superfast speeds today and that will rise to 95 per cent next year. We are happy and confident to engage in a debate on the future of our industry. But we are concerned that the debate should not degenerate into an exchange of soundbites that serve one party or another's narrow commercial interests. The future of the nation's digital infrastructure is too important for that."