FROM THE INDUSTRY
going to be pretty difficult to differentiate - it’s going to be more about brand and service. If you’re buying wholesale, by definition, you’re paying a chunk of money to BT Openreach, and that then constrains your ability in terms of what you charge. If you’ve got your own network like we have, then we can continue to be competitive. There’ll still be product and price differentiation. Time has shown that some companies who should have fixed their service issues ages ago haven’t; their service is bad now as it was 10, 15 years ago. There has been a bit of transition in recent times as well; 15 years ago, everyone thought that 15Mbps per was fine. Well, it’s not, it’s terrible. People thought 100Mbps was amazing at the time, and now they expect 1Gb as standard. Expectations are much higher now – speed, price, service. It’s a tall order. Within the fibre industry and the ISPs, there’s going to be those people who have gone for a quicker, lower cost hit in the short term, who will then cap out, and then they’ll have a big technology
What does the future look like? There’ll be more fluidity in the marketplace, thanks to One Touch Switching, because there’s less friction and it’ll be less risky to move. I think we’ll see more ISPs, because Openreach has now got up ahead of steam. As they build more fibre, there’ll be more players who will want to play in that space. But there’s also an industry challenge; there’s an awful lot of fibre companies around the country that are small and haven’t got to critical mass. The capital markets are really difficult. Raising money is currently very tough. We are one of the winners in the marketplace, but a lot will go by the wayside. We were network builders as opposed to just internet service providers. When internet service providers purchase wholesale, we for example have a wholesaler agreement, so they talk and buy wholesale off us. Providers will be buying wholesale from Openreach and in a few years’ time they’ll have most of the country covered in fibre. There’ll be more players, but equally there’s going to be a winners and losers in the fibre market. If you’re buying the same product from Openreach, and then it’s
cost to reinvest to be able to move from a one gig service to a 10Gb service. We are lucky in that regard. There’ll be points of differentiation in terms of the speed offering. Prices by definition will get closer and closer and closer over time. But then again, you’ve got two different markets. You’ve got the market who are buying wholesale in the market for the people who built their own network. The convergence of market forces, human nature and technology continues to surprise. It’s a fascinating time to be involved in the evolution of broadband.
www.communityfibre.co.uk
SEPTEMBER 2024 Volume 46 No.3
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