Openreach Industry Consultation – How we propose to exit the 103 priority exchanges by 2030

On 22 June 2023, Openreach published the next industry consultation on the Exchange Exit Programme.

The Executive Summary reads as follows:

“As an industry we have embarked on a fundamental upgrade of the UK’s broadband infrastructure with billions of pounds being invested by Openreach and others to deploy FTTP across the UK This investment will allow customers to benefit from higher quality,
more reliable network services with gigabit speeds, and will future proof a key foundation of the UK’s digital economy. It will also allow Openreach and its Communications Provider (CP) customers to simplify the network and infrastructure that is used to deliver broadband in the UK. This simplification and the resulting cost reduction is an important element of the case to invest in FTTP at scale and pace.

Reducing the number of exchange buildings – and consolidating equipment within them – are key elements of this simplification, allowing Openreach and CPs to reduce cost and me more energy efficient. In 2020 Openreach laid out our plan to reduce the number of exchange buildings from c.5,600 today, with a focus on exiting at least 100 by 2030, and an ambition to exit a large majority of the remaining 4,500 non-Openreach Handover Point (OHP) exchanges in the early 2030s. This requires customers to migrate onto FTTP, SOGEA/SOGFAST or Leased line services that are served from those 1,000 ‘enduring’ OHP exchanges, and away from legacy services that rely on the 4,600 non-OHP exchanges. This is a significant undertaking that will require close cooperation across industry. To provide a basis for learning, Openreach started a pilot with industry in May 2021 to exit 5 exchanges over a 3-year period. Learnings from this will continue to inform our approach.

In December 2022 Openreach published a list of 103 exchanges that Openreach have prioritised for exit by 2030. Although the 103 represent a small subset of the c.4,600 non-OHP exchanges, a successful exit will still require around 1 million services to be migrated from retiring to enduring exchanges. Much of this will happen naturally over the 2020s as customers upgradeto IP and-digital voice services. But careful planning and coordination will be needed to migrate Ethernet and other point-to-point services, and to protect vulnerable customers and Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) services. A wide range of products will be impacted, and CPs will need to plan for how they will remove their equipment and services from these 103 exchanges and migrate customers to products supported from OHP exchanges. This includes copper (MPF, SLU (Sub Loop Unbundling)), Leased lines (EAD, Optical and Dark Fibre), Passive Infrastructure Access (PIA) and exchange-based infrastructure products (Co-Locate and Access Locate).

As part of these migrations CPs will need to consider how customer site visits to upgrade FTTP, SOGEA and Ethernet equipment will be achieved for both residential and business customers.

This consultation sets out the approach Openreach intend to take to exit these 103 exchanges. Our guiding principles in designing this approach have been to (i) minimise the impact on customers; (ii) protect vulnerable customer groups and CNI; and (iii) minimise costs for industry, including both CPs and Openreach.

Openreach welcome feedback from CPs on our approach.

Responses should be completed via the Formwize link. The deadline for responses is 21st September 2023.”

The full document can be downloaded from here.