Housing: Broadband

(asked on 30th November 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps his Department in taking to prevent developers entering into exclusivity arrangements with internet providers and locking residents in to a limited range of broadband services.


Answered by
Matt Warman Portrait
Matt Warman
This question was answered on 7th December 2020

Ofcom has powers to impose network access requirements on providers it deems to hold significant market power, requiring these providers to allow other operators to access their network. Ofcom regularly reviews market definitions and remedies, and is currently consulting on regulations to apply from April 2021.

Additionally, the Communications (Access to Infrastructure) Regulations 2016 enable telecoms operators to request information about the physical infrastructure of other utilities, transport and communications providers, and provide the right to access that infrastructure on fair and reasonable terms and conditions. We are currently reviewing whether these Regulations can be improved to encourage more use of infrastructure sharing to deploy telecoms networks.

Taken together, these measures help increase the numbers of different services consumers can choose from.

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