ISPA | Openreach

We’re really proud to be the headline sponsor of this year’s Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) conference. ISPA is the trade association for internet service providers in the UK and aims to promote collaboration and dialogue between its members and the wider internet community. The conference is an opportunity for the industry to debate how providers should react to stay competitive and successful in challenging market conditions.

Openreach’s role at the conference

The theme of this year’s conference is competition and collaboration. Over the course of the conference our chairman, Mike McTighe, our director of corporate affairs Catherine Colloms, and our MD for customer, commercial and propositions Katie Milligan are addressing Openreach’s dedication to working closely with central and local government, and the wider industry, to deliver our challenging Fibre First programme.

Other topics of conversation

Mike, Catherine and Katie will also be talking about the following key topics across the day:

• they’ll highlight the huge changes we’ve made at Openreach in the past year and how our recent transformation into becoming our own legally separate entity will allow us to have greater strategic and operational independence. This greater independence means we’re constantly talking to providers about the road ahead and consulting with them on major strategic investments
• our pace and scale of Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) build and how we’re on track to reach our ambition of getting full fibre to three million premises by the end of 2020/21 and to hopefully reach 10 million premises by the mid-2020s, depending on if the right conditions are in place
• they’ll reaffirm our belief in full infrastructure competition. One way we’ve been doing this is by working incredibly hard to improve access to our ducts and poles to help others build more across the UK, and crucially helping providers and their customers to take advantage of the better network we’re building
• our offer for long-term reductions on our wholesale fibre products. We currently offer to install FTTP free of charge to all new housing developments of 30 or more homes and recently announced a 75 per cent price reduction for new-builds on small scale developments – those with fewer than 30 premises. We hope that this will incentivise internet providers and property developers to upgrade their customers to the faster and more reliable services we’ve built.

Ultimately, we’re ambitious, we’re up for the challenge and we’re determined to be the national full fibre provider. We believe it’s this kind of industry togetherness that’s going to be needed to deliver on the government’s full fibre ambition and we’re working hard across the industry to try and get the right conditions in place that will encourage that.

Fundamentally, our aim is to deliver great outcomes for internet providers, businesses, end customers and the UK as a whole.