Sky has demanded that Ofcom’s ongoing strategic review of digital communications be used to address the "significant risk of BT re-establishing a strong position in the retail provision of those services in the UK", as well as the poor quality of the Openreach service.
The submission stated:
"BT’s Openreach division does not deliver 21st century quality of service. Openreach owns and is responsible for maintaining the UK’s critical ‘last mile’ copper network – the ubiquitous network of lines into peoples’ homes, and to small businesses.
"The quality of service delivered to consumers by Openreach falls far short of an acceptable standard, including: an excessive number of faults, failure to meet targets for repairing faults, long waits to have new lines installed, constantly missing appointments and, when appointments are met, often not completing jobs. "
Sky claimed a number of specific failures by BT, saying that 90 percent of new line installations take 10 calendar days or longer and one in ten takes longer than 30 days, while arguing that performance in fixing faults is "consistently below targets".
In addition, it claims that Openreach changes installation dates around 36,000 times a month, misses over 500 appointments each month and fails to complete 4,000 jobs per month.
Openreach was created ten years ago as a separate unit of BT after Ofcom’s last strategic review of the sector. However, it has consistently attracted criticism from rivals, with Ofcom imposing new requirements on Openreach last year.
The most drastic solution, as advocated by TalkTalk and Sky, would be for Ofcom to separate Openreach from BT altogether.
Mai Fyfield, Sky’s Chief Strategy Officer, said:
"We are drawing attention to the problems in broadband because they are important to the economy as a whole. They affect competition between providers and have a direct impact on consumers and small businesses, resulting in inconvenience, dissatisfaction and loss of productivity. The UK needs to get the basics right in broadband as well as develop the networks and services of the future."
"We believe that Ofcom should move quickly to ask the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to undertake a full competition inquiry.
"A reference to the CMA would allow these vital issues to be examined with increased speed and thoroughness by a body with the powers to take whatever action should be deemed necessary. Given the rapid changes taking place in the sector, we believe this should happen as soon as possible."
Part of BT’s response to Sky might be that the pay-TV sector, in which Sky is dominant, treats BT unfairly.
"We would argue that there are certain parts of the market where there is a dominant player – Pay TV – that does not have the same expectations and restrictions that BT has to work with," BT CEO Gavin Patterson commented recently. "When customers increasingly buy in bundles, the difference becomes extremely blurred between a Pay TV-led bundle and a telco-led bundle."
A BT spokesperson responded to Sky’s claims today: "The forthcoming Ofcom review is an important piece of work so it is disappointing that Sky are engaging in selective spin rather than constructive dialogue.
"They claim that Openreach investment is down yet it is up. They can only substantiate their claim by ignoring the billions of pounds we have pumped into fibre broadband.
"They also make claims about customer service whilst failing to acknowledge that Openreach has passed all sixty of the service targets it was set by Ofcom.
"We acknowledge there is more to do on customer service but breaking up BT is not the answer.
"It would lead to huge uncertainty and fundamentally undermine the case for future investment dragging the UK backwards at the very time it needs important investment in its infrastructure."
