England Makes Gigabit Broadband A Requirement For All New Home Builds
from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept
England has taken a big step toward crushing the digital divide with new rules requiring that all new home builds must include gigabit (1000 Megabits per second, Mbps) broadband. Estimates suggest that around 12 percent of the 171,190 new homes constructed in England last year didn’t have gigabit broadband capabilities upon completion.
Amendments to Building Regulations 2010 require that all new builds have gigabit-capable connections, though there is a construction cost cap of £2,000 per home. According to the government’s new guidance, if a gigabit line can’t be found within that price range, the next-fastest speed available has to suffice.
I’m not sure this will be quite as transformative as headlines suggest. Readying a home for gigabit broadband isn’t the same thing as actually delivering gigabit broadband. It can often cost users tens of thousands of dollars (sometimes hundreds of thousands) to get ISPs to expand “last mile” access to your home. Still, mandating that new homes are gigabit ready is useful.
The new laws also make it easier for ISPs to gain access to homes or apartments for broadband installs should landlords prove unresponsive:
Previously, tenants living in the UK’s estimated 480,000 blocks of flats and apartments (also known as multi-dwelling units, or MDUs) would usually have had to wait for a landlord’s permission to have a broadband operator enter their building to install a faster connection. These access rights are essential for the delivery of broadband upgrades as operators are unable to deploy their services without first obtaining permission, either from the landowner or a court, to install their equipment.
Like here in the States, there’s an awful lot of shenanigans where ISPs work in concert with landlords to block access to competitors. It’s taken the FCC here in the States decades and numerous rule revisions to even try and tackle that problem. But it remains very much a work in progress, as deep-pocketed telecom monopolies and their lawyers often tap dance around the requirements.
While many landlords are annoying and difficult, telecom giants often like to over-state landlords’ role in the overall lack of quality broadband deployments. That was evident in New York City, where Verizon flaked on a 2008 agreement to wire the whole city with fiber, then repeatedly tried to exclusively blame landlords for the company’s own (well in character) failure to follow through on the agreement.
There are other policies that are common sensical that we just don’t do because it would (gasp) make it easier to drive competition into monopoly markets. Such as “dig once” requirements that all new highway builds come with fiber-ready conduit already installed. This sort of policy is a no brainer, yet in the U.S. meaningful mandates on this front always seem stuck just around the next corner.
Filed Under: dig once, digital divide, fiber, gigabit, high speed internet, landlords, telecom policy, uk
Comments on “England Makes Gigabit Broadband A Requirement For All New Home Builds”
In most cases nobody is selling homes without a FTTP hookup of some sorts, its all the telcos will supply these days. The real scummy builders will just find a way around it.
It reminds me when they wanted new homes to have EV charging points, and the cheap builders were just putting in a standard plug socket. Even when they strengthened the regs they started putting in a 3.5KW half power EVSE, wired in thin wire that couldn’t support switching to a real 7KW socket. Anything to get them a few more pennies profit.
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In Canada, it’s the real scummy ISPs that have found away around it by capturing the regulator. They’re now only putting in fibre, which seems great… except that their competitors have no practical access to this fibre. They’d have to pay upward of $100/month for wire access, plus incumbent-provided backhaul to a central location, plus their own costs of providing actual internet service. Meanwhile, the incumbents are advertising retail services for like $60/month, which is about what the third-party providers charge on legacy wires.
The standard “scummy builder” scam here is rental appliances, particularly water heaters. If you don’t want to sign a contract to pay several times what they’re worth (over 10+ years), the builder will cancel your contract and find someone who will.
Great, but insufficiently ambitious
I think they should’ve and could’ve gone a bit farther here. Considering these wires could remain for decades, anything being installed should support 100 Gbit/s if not 1 Tbit/s. No need to provide those speeds right away, but the fibre should be cabable of it (and, realistically, probably already is). Anything underground should be required to be in conduit. And, ideally, anything being installed should be run to reasonably central locations where any ISP could put equipment, in case Openreach’s transceivers and backbone fail to keep up with the modern speeds these ISPs would like to offer.
Exceptions like the cost cap should apply in built-up areas only, where one might have to dig up entire blocks to meet the requirements. There’s no excuse not to do it properly when building new neighbourhoods.
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Imperial Government is wonderful, and unbounded by economic reality.
Politicians merely wave their hand and effortlessly change the world.
” I wish it, I command it, Make it so “
Is that as big a problem in the UK as it is in the US?
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Yes and No.
It’s not as bad as the US, as we have LLU which means you can pick from dozens of suppliers however pretty much all of them run on the same backbone offered by one company.
Which means in theory we get competition but are still at the mercy of the backbone provider expanding/improving service to your actual home.
For example a dozen companies will all happily sell me a standard broadband package which is either 30Meg or 60Meg here in the UK.
However the most my line will actually support is 15Meg (bigger issue is our dreadful upload speed of 0.5Meg 🙁 ) so it doesn’t matter which company I go with there is no way for me to get the 30/60 speeds they advertise. (Though here in the UK they need to disclose your actual expected speed before ordering, so I know what speed to expect, the 30/60 speeds advertised are the average speeds across the country).
Which means my house gets to count towards the fibre connected homes stat despite only getting ADSL speeds.
Looks like these new requirements also have similar loopholes in them so the government and ISP’s can say a house is Gigabit ready but without getting anywhere near those speeds.
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On what basis do they claim “fibre-connected”? Even dialup traffic will eventually encounter fibre somewhere upstream.
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The UK used to be really good, with LLU meaning that the former government monopoly of BT were forced to share their infrastructure, so the problems associated with the US private monopolies didn’t exist.
It’s been a while since I lived there, but my understanding is that since tech has expanded and fibre has become the norm, it’s not been as much a priority to expand such ideas to those places with the newer and more expensive tech.
had it not been for Gavin patterson, i think is his name, convincing the Tory government that the uk didn’t need anything above 30mps, the whole country would have had much faster than they have now! i wonder who got the brown envelopes to hold UK broadband back to the pathetic level 90% of the country has to put up with? as usual, pay the fuckers in charge so the rest of the country gets fuck all except crap!!
End of the day, we really don’t have much to complain about over tbh.
Local-loop unbundling
In the UK, we have lots of competition in the delivery of Internet. 100% because of Local-loop unbundling.
to quote cable.co.uk
Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) is the process that allows companies other than BT to provide broadband services using BT’s network infrastructure. There’s quite a bit to unpack there, so let us break it down for you.
BT is the incumbent broadband provider for pretty much the whole of the UK (the exception is Hull, which has KCOM as its incumbent provider for reasons we won’t go into now). This means BT owns and is responsible for maintaining the UK’s national broadband network. It does this through a subsidiary, Openreach.
Local Loop is the name given to the cables, the physical part of the broadband network that runs between your home and your local telephone exchange. You may have also heard this referred to as the ‘last mile’ of a broadband connection. Local Loop Unbundling allows other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to install their software at the telephone exchange and provide a broadband service over the existing network cables.
Since Ofcom told BT to open up its telephone exchanges to other ISPs in 2001, hundreds of thousands of local loops have been unbundled from BT. This has allowed providers such as Sky, TalkTalk, Plusnet and others to offer broadband deals and compete directly with BT without having the enormous expense of building their own networks.
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A good idea, but messages from others have shown the limitations in practice. You might have dozens of ISPs offering you the same shitty DSL service, with apparently no good way to push Openreach to upgrade it; nor is it clear there’s an effective process for bypassing Openreach.
Ideally, an ISP that has enough subscribers in an area should have some practical way to upgrade the connections in that area. Maybe by automatically getting pole/conduit rights when they reach a certain density, or having the right to stick their equipment in the Openreach boxes/buildings. The new landlord rules will help, but those wires have to go somewhere when they exit the building.
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They have that right, as Openreach connects customers to the ISP’s equipment. The ISP supplies the customer modem and the exchange DSLAM.
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I phrased my comment poorly. I meant, specifically, equipment that provides modern speeds. DSL generally struggles to provide 50 Mbit/s; customers can get maybe 300 Mbit/s if they’re within 300 metres of the DSLAM on a very clean line, and I don’t know how common that is in the UK. (The degradation happens quickly: at 500 m, you’re down to 100 Mbit/s.) The VDSL2 vectoring feature, helpful for getting the highest speeds, is considered incompatible with local loop unbundling. I don’t think there’s any serious work still ongoing to improve DSL.
I’m talking more about routers and fibre transceivers (or DOCSIS nodes if cable TV wiring is present, though I’m told this is very rare in the UK). That way, even if the incumbent has oversubscribed their passive optical network or backbone, or doesn’t want to do more than a gigabit, or whatever, the ISP can ask to have the customer’s fibre moved to separate equipment. “One of their fibres”, I should say, in case someone wants a backup connection, takes on a tenant, or otherwise needs multiple services.
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what it didn’t do was give other companies, at that time, to install their own hardware and who can blame them for not wanting to do so anyway. Patterson restricted the broadband speed in the uk because he wanted to not spend the millions in installing fibre, wanted to ensure he left bt/openreach with a nice big pension and golden handshake in place and that investers were repaid. the only way to achieve his aims was to not have to do what was being bandied about at the time. replace the aging copper and aluminium cabling with fibre costing a fortune! the UK is trying to claw itself back as a top provider but bt/openreach are gonna be well screwed now other companies are doing fibre to the home installs
What classifies as a “New Home Build”? I’m curious due to the sheer number of homes I’ve been in in the UK that were “new” in that someone had run conduit along the walls for indoor plumbing and electricity.
The UK isn’t like the US where a sizeable portion of all home purchases are going to be “new” from the ground up.
Yes, yes. “New homes.” Gee, thanks. i’m sure that will close up the digital divide right quick for everyone.
Perceptions
I don’t really see much of a “thing” here.
Most countries at that level, UK, US, etc, are gigabit ready.
In the last 10 years, it would be hard, and likely more expensive, to use less capable wiring.
Cat5 and fibre are so common you would have to work hard to build below 1kT
Thank You for sharing the great information. This is very useful.