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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the (a) time taken and (b) costs paid by small businesses to access British Telecom ducts under physical infrastructure access regulations.

Ofcom has published (April 2017) a consultation on duct and pole access (DPA - sometimes called passive infrastructure access - PIA), which proposed to make such access faster, easier and cheaper. Altnet providers, such as WarwickNet, are already using PIA to connect customers on much shorter timescales than previously.

In the consultation, Ofcom outlined how the planning and deployment of fibre infrastructure using PIA should be improved. Openreach is already providing telecoms providers with better network information, with its PIA Digital Mapping Tool, and streamlining operational processes.

Ofcom also proposed capping Openreach’s rental charges for PIA access and redistributing the costs of changes to the network across all users. These proposals would make it cheaper for other telecoms providers to deploy fibre using Openreach’s duct and pole infrastructure.

Ofcom will set out more detail on these proposals later in the summer.