Following a report from INCA and Point Topic that altnets have now passed more premises in aggregate than Openreach, Neos CEO Lee Myall states that consolidation is the next natural step.
Thu, 15/02/2024 - 12:53
INCA has formed a Special Interest Group to encourage infrastructure sharing between altnets and third parties.
The creation of the Infrastructure Sharing Group is a reaction to builds being cancelled across the UK where Openreach’s PIA is not available or useable, according to Chairman and MS3 CEO Guy Miller.
He said: “To ensure the sector can continue building quality networks without issue, this group has been formed to tackle one of the sector’s growing issues.
“The creation of the group has been well received by members, who agree that sharing infrastructure should be prioritised when deploying networks, especially in areas where Openreach PIA is not available or at capacity.”
Aims of the group include options for altnet infrastructure sharing at scale, speeding up deployment, improving the ability for altnets to generate incremental revenue, and testing and implementation plans to reduce noise around pole deployments to improve conditions for local communities.
The next meeting of the group will be on February 27th.
In reaction to the Group's formation, Neos Network’s CTO Matt Rees said: “With a large number of siloed networks being developed today, and at huge costs, sharing infrastructure will start to improve the economics of extending FTTx, with significantly less disruption too.”
“An interesting trend that could help infrastructure sharing in the fixed-network is an ‘open network’ approach, which involves the separation of hardware and software, which allows hardware from different vendors to work together. By the very nature of networks becoming more open, it makes it easier to extend services over the same physical infrastructure.
