BT on Monday reiterated its warning that it requires regulatory certainty to justify future infrastructure investments, but said that for now it is still pushing on with G.fast.
The comment, sent to Total Telecom by a spokesman for the U.K. incumbent, came after BT CEO Gavin Patterson told the Sunday Telegraph that he would postpone network investment and go to court to prevent Ofcom from forcing a structural separation of BT and Openreach.
According to the report, Patterson also warned that BT’s £7 billion pension deficit would be harder to narrow if Openreach became a separate company.
Ofcom revealed last week that splitting BT from its infrastructure arm is one option under consideration in order to boost competition in the U.K.’s telco sector. The proposal falls under the remit of Ofcom’s in-depth Strategic Review of Digital Communications.
Rivals Sky and TalkTalk have been lobbying for a split, arguing that Openreach’s infrastructure and levels of service are inadequate to meet the needs of cons umers and businesses.
BT has routinely pointed out that it was the only company willing and able to invest in a large-scale fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) deployment at the height of the recession. The company warns that enforcing a breakup would create three-to-five years of uncertainty, prompting BT to put upcoming network deployments on hold.
However, until the picture becomes clearer, those deployment plans are still going ahead.
BT on Friday invited equipment suppliers to register their interest in participating in G.fast trials.
BT hopes G.fast will enable it to upgrade the peak speed of its FTTC network to 500 Mbps, and it has pledged to deploy the technology to most of the U.K. within a decade.
