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Companies to reportedly launch joint advertising campaign in response to attacks by Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone.
BT and Virgin Media will launch a joint advertising campaign defending Openreach’s track record in the face of sustained attack from Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone.
This is according to a Telegraph report on Saturday which said that newspaper adverts will assert that the U.K. enjoys faster average download speeds compared to Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and will claim that BT and Virgin Media have together invested £15 billion (€17.5 billion) in infrastructure over the past five years.
"BT and Virgin Media may be commercial rivals but we both have a proud track record of investing billions of pounds in the U.K.’s digital infrastructure," said BT chief executive Gavin Patterson, in the report.
The advertisements are a response to the ‘Fix Britain’s Internet’ campaign, which is backed by Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and the Federation of Communication Services (FCS).
They have encouraged consumers to lobby U.K. telco regulator Ofcom to force a full structural separation of BT and its infrastructure arm Openreach, claiming that it is the best way to improve Openreach’s quality of service and encourage further investment in fibre networks.
Patterson responded in a letter, seen by the Financial Times, accusing the group of depicting an unfairly diminished view of connectivity in Britain, and of making misleading statements.
Fix Britain’s Internet responded with a letter of its own, criticising BT for its continued reliance on copper instead of upgrading to fibre, and for ploughing money into broadcast rights to Premier League football, money that would have been better spent on networks.
The increasingly bitter battle between BT, Virgin and altnets comes as the European Commission seeks to stimulate increased deployment in ultrafast broadband networks.
Last week, Brussels unveiled a series of proposals aimed at giving telcos greater confidence to invest. It is hoped that by overhauling the regulatory framework, all European Union households will be able to access at least 100-Mbps broadband by 2025.
