BT Group: Openreach To Provide Wholesale Broadband Discounts For Upgrade

(RTTNews) - BT Group (BT_A.L, BT) said that digital network business Openreach is introducing a new offer that encourages Communication Providers or CPs to upgrade a large proportion of the country's homes and businesses to its broadband services.

The offer - which covers its Fibre-to-the-Premises or FTTP and Fibre-to-the-Cabinet or FTTC wholesale services - is the result of several months of work and discussions with CPs. The offer gives CPs access to long-term discounts in return for upgrading their customers from predominantly copper-based services.

The company noted that the discounts go beyond the regulator Ofcom's pricing controls on Openreach's broadband products, and they will allow CPs to encourage more of their customers onto better services.

So far, 10 million households and businesses have upgraded to superfast broadband on the Openreach network, but such services are available to almost 28 million British premises, according to BT Group.

Separately, Openreach announced a new, supplementary wholesale discount structure for fibre broadband in return for volume commitments.

Openreach said it is offering long-term discounts that go beyond Ofcom's pricing controls on its broadband products. The new wholesale prices will be available to all of Openreach's Communication Provider or CP customers from 21 August, giving greater certainty on prices for a period of three or five years.

The discounts are available to any business - including small CPs - that grows its FTTC and FTTP customer base on Openreach's network by an agreed proportion over a three or five year period.

BT Group said it expects that the new pricing structure for fibre broadband is likely to have an adverse impact "in the order of high tens of millions of pounds" on Openreach's revenue and EBITDA in 2018/19. The final net impact at Group level will depend on retail market dynamics.

The company added that there is no change to Group financial outlook for 2018/19.