Report (1st Day)

Part of Digital Economy Bill [HL] – in the House of Lords at 6:00 pm on 1 March 2010.

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Photo of The Earl of Erroll The Earl of Erroll Crossbench 6:00, 1 March 2010

My Lords, I have taken over this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Laird, because I originally wanted to table it myself but I was away at the time and could not get my e-mail to work from abroad, sadly, and could not get through to the Public Bill Office. The objective of this amendment is to try to strengthen the Government's hand in what they put through in Amendments 2 and 3, effectively, which is to put a duty on Ofcom to sort out a particular part of communications infrastructure which unfortunately has heavy underinvestment. The challenge that this amendment seeks to address is the lack of investment in maintaining the local loop, which is the part from the exchange to the customer, when it falls outside areas of high population density: in other words, rural areas and bits of towns which are not covered particularly well.

The problem arises because Openreach is a separate company but is also a subsidiary of BT, and it is responsible for the repairs and maintenance of this part of the infrastructure. Unfortunately, it suffers from severe financial constraints, not all of which are operational. For instance, there is a huge pension deficit in BT, which means that it has had to cut back on maintenance to a bare minimum. The trouble is that the average non-technical customer has real problems in continuing to receive the service for which they originally contracted their ISP. The ISPs have problems delivering it because they are finding that the lines are degrading. I have noticed that, the more I have said this in other fora, the more people join in and say, "Exactly; my line is getting worse and worse".

Let us say that you have got a fault on a line which has not been unbundled: in other words, it is still in BT's ownership. You are paying BT Retail for the line, and you are paying an ISP to provide you with broadband over that line. It gets a service from BT Wholesale, which runs what is called the backhaul from the exchange onto the main internet. Openreach is responsible for maintaining and fixing any faults on the line. There are four service entities involved, and there may be more. There are Chinese walls between these, and there is a lot of buck-passing. Let us say that your broadband is not working. You are meant to ring up your ISP, and tell it so. It is then allowed to test the line, and it may well use BT Retail stuff to do that, or it may be Openreach. Do not hold me to the exact detail of who owns which bit. BT Retail's universal service obligation only covers voice over copper, not the maintenance of broadband connections. So it will probably pass that test, but it is still not adequate for broadband, so it comes back and reports that the line is not faulty, but you know, empirically, that it is.

What do you do next? This is a challenge, because you cannot talk to BT Wholesale. The other thing that could be happening is that either BT Wholesale, or your ISP, could be throttling back your internet connection and reducing the speed on it because it has a lot of traffic, or they could be doing what they call traffic shaping, which is allowing only certain types of traffic through at full speed. This is done through a digital line management unit, which is connected to your digital subscriber line access management unit in the exchange. These are technical things, but they will not tell you if they are doing them. There is no way of finding out, so you are stuck. I have discovered, because my line fell to under half its speed over a four-year period, that, when this sort of thing happens, if you can pester people persistently over a six-month period, and you know something about it, and eventually your line fails completely, there are some excellent engineers at Openreach who can and will come and sort it out. My line is now nearly treble the speed it was a couple of months ago, so they can do it. There is not a real problem with the lines. The trouble is the underinvestment.

Amendment 9A has a couple of main points. The proposed new subsections 2(a) and 2(b) are supposed to deal with the problem of buck-passing, so that somebody is responsible for sorting out your fault. The next bit addresses the part of the problem whereby, because of the underinvestment and the fact that they are kept on a very short rein, whenever they come to repair your line, they will do the minimum possible to get it working to the minimum standard possible, because there is not much money. Therefore, they could be upgrading these lines when they replace stretches of line. They could be putting in 0.9mm copper instead of 0.5mm: but no, it will go in at 0.5mm, which tends to be universal. With broadband, we want to get better stuff in there, but they will not do that because it costs more money. That is why, under proposed new subsections 2(c) and 2(d), repairs would not be done at the bare minimum. Where possible, they should try to increase the capacity of those lines and improve them, and use that opportunity to steadily improve the network in distant rural points. This is supposed to be positive, and it would give Ofcom powers to put something together that might manage some of the problem. This will also require some co-operation and some financial sorting out, and some other things, but maybe it is a start. I beg to move.