Sky Accuses BT Openreach Of Not Spending Enough On Broadband

The attack on BT and the way it handles Openreach continues, and this time Sky’s Chief Strategy Officer, Mai Fyfield wrote a piece about it, which ended up being published on The Telegraph.

For those unfamiliar with the long-lasting battle:

Openreach looks after the fibres, wires and cables that connect the country, and it’s up to BT to make sure it keeps moving forward. However, there have been many voices out there saying Openreach would do a much better job without the shackles of BT.

Ofcom’s Strategic Review of the UK’s digital communications market will decide whether or not to separate BT from control of their telecoms and broadband network, and Fyfield has slammed BT for “under-investment” in its national infrastructure and attacks their “unacceptable levels of faults and service problems.”

“Most frequent is the claim that only BT would have invested £2.5bn in the roll-out of fibre. Yet BT’s own accounts put this figure in perspective. Over the investment period, Openreach generated around £15bn of earnings, while its total capital expenditure remained broadly flat. In practice, fibre roll-out has been funded in part by cutting spending on other critical parts of the network, with service quality and reliability suffering,” Fyfield writes.

BT’s Group Director of Strategy and Policy, Sean Williams, has been quick to rebuff Sky’s remarks as “plain untrue“, adding that “no investments have been diverted away from Openreach, ISPreview wrote in a report.

“BT Group has played a vital role by investing £10.5bn of capital in to Openreach over the past 10 years.”