Nic Fildes

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for a greater degree of “regulatory humility” to open the door to greater investment in 5G and fibre networks.

Chairman Pai defended the decision to do away with hard-fought rules on network neutrality that forbid broadband providers from blocking or limiting internet traffic from some content providers while selling “fast lanes” to others. He said that spending by telecoms companies had fallen after the regulations were introduced which he attributed to “heavy-handed legal framework applied by the FCC” that had deterred investment. “Infrastructure spending is lower today than in 2015. That does not benefit consumers,” he said. Chairman Pai argued that telecoms companies needed to be offered incentives to justify the billions of dollars of investment in 5G and fibre networks and has moved to deregulate the industry as a result. “My goal is to return to the goals of the open internet,” he said, rebuffing accusations that the removal of net neutrality regulations would lead to telecoms companies manipulating internet access to favour certain services.

The British government is aiming to connect an extra 600,000 homes in rural areas to superfast broadband, after BT released almost £300 million of funds back into a scheme designed to address the gap between speeds available in the countryside and in cities. The original subsidies provided by the government to BT to roll out superfast broadband — of speeds of at least 24 Mbps — to rural areas included clawback mechanisms if take-up was better than expected. The cash was described as a “windfall” by the government, which was criticised during the early stages of the Broadband Delivery UK project for handing all the contracts to BT and being unclear about when specific regions would benefit and how the costs would be shared.

Virgin Media is to test Europe’s network neutrality rules after launching 4G services in the UK that offer free access to Facebook’s messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger.

Those services will be “zero rated,” meaning that they can be used without eating into a customer’s data allowance. Although European Union telecoms regulations do not forbid zero-rating, guidelines published by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications — which will oversee the enforcement of the rules — have curtailed its usage. Networks are prohibited from providing free access to some apps if the data allowance is used up, for example.

During the first dotcom boom, CenturyLink was a barely considered long-distance telephone company serving about 2 million customers in the deep south of America. A little more than a decade later, the company stands to be transformed through the acquisition of Level 3 — a former darling of that tech boom and now one of the largest global internet providers critical to data-intensive businesses such as Netflix and Google. CenturyLink has grown rapidly in recent years to become the third-largest fixed-line telecoms player in the US behind AT&T and Verizon, as well as a major competitor in the market selling telecoms services to companies. But the acquisition of Level 3 will give the group global significance for the first time, propelling it above Verizon in the US enterprise market and greatly expanding its internet services business as data use rapidly increases.

Matthew Hancock, the UK’s new minister for broadband, has warned BT he was “on the side of the challenger” in the government’s attempt to improve Britain’s internet speeds and coverage.

Hancock told the Broadband World Forum that the UK wanted “ubiquitous connectivity by 2020, hotspots of hyper connectivity, and doing the work now to deliver fibre and 5G in the future”. He also used the speech, his first on broadband since he replaced Ed Vaizey as minister, to “pay tribute” to BT’s rivals for pushing speeds higher with projects such as Gigaclear’s investment in the Cotswolds and Sky, TalkTalk and CityFibre’s project to connect York to a faster fibre network. He underlined Kcom’s investment in “full fibre” networks in Hull — the only part of the country not touched by BT’s network — that expects to double its ultrafast broadband base by the end of 2017 — without any government subsidy.

The development of a third ultrafast broadband network for the UK, to compete with Openreach and Virgin Media, is “highly unlikely”, according to a report commissioned by BT and submitted to the regulator Ofcom.

Ofcom is trying to improve competition with the opening up of BT’s network of underground ducts and telegraph poles for other companies to use to run their own fibre cables to homes and businesses. “A good long-term outcome would be to achieve fully competition between three or more networks for around 40 percent of premises, with competition from two providers in many areas beyond that,” the regulator said. But BT’s report, from telecoms consultancy Analysys Mason, said it would only be financially viable for a new entrant to deploy to 2 million homes, or 7 percent of the country, if it was achieving a market share of 25 percent. If a “more realistic” outcome of a 20 percent market share was achieved by the new operator, coverage would fall to a mere 4 percent, using ducts and poles.

European Union citizens will be able to use their phones abroad for as long as they like without incurring roaming fees, after all. Brussels executed a public U-turn in a desperate attempt to rescue a policy that was once held up as a tangible example of the EU’s benefit to ordinary citizens only to become a source of consumer ire. The cause of anger was a European Commission proposal from September that would have limited to 90 days a year the period for which mobile phone users would be spared roaming charges in Europe. Amid outrage from MEPs and consumer groups, the commission on Wednesday introduced a new proposal that scrapped the unpopular 90-day limit. It also includes measures to root out potential abuse of the ban on roaming charges in an effort to placate telecoms companies, which have complained bitterly about the loss of roaming fees.

Ask someone if they want broadband 35 times faster than the average and they will answer in the affirmative — probably with the addition of a few choice words regarding the service they receive at present. Like disgruntled football fans, British broadband users are not short of opinions about their internet speeds.

The industry has been embroiled in a very public fight about the state of broadband and what needs to be done. BT, and its engineering arm Openreach, say Britain has some of the best internet speeds in Europe. Its detractors, including Vodafone, TalkTalk and Sky, who compete with BT but rely on access to Openreach’s network, argue the country risks falling behind in the race to build networks that offer the speeds needed to support autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. With the EU looking to set the bar for minimum broadband speeds much higher than being contemplated in Britain, fears have started to build after the Brexit vote that Britain is trailing the pack and may never catch up. The argument about the state of the market has become concentrated on the length of copper wire that runs from the point that fibre optic cables stop to the customer’s door — roughly 7 per cent of the entire length of a broadband connection. BT’s critics want old copper lines to be abandoned and fibre optic cables run straight to the home — something BT is unwilling to pay for.

Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT, has written to his counterparts at rival broadband providers Sky, Vodafone and TalkTalk to complain that their ‘Fix Britain’s Internet’ campaign is misleading consumers and “talking down” Britain. Patterson’s personal intervention comes amid a fractious debate about the state of Britain’s broadband that has seen BT’s rivals and MPs call for the break-up of BT and its Openreach division.

Patterson has written to Baroness Harding, chief executive of TalkTalk; Jeremy Darroch, chief executive of Sky; and Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone Group to express his alarm at the tone of the debate. The letter argues that the Fix Britain’s Internet campaign “paints an unfairly diminished view of connectivity across the UK and makes a number of misleading statements”.