Ofcom has lowered the bar for taking the price cap off copper lines

Ofcom published a statement on 9 September on how one of the copper retirement thresholds is calculated. It reads like a regulatory footnote. It decides when price protection can be removed from copper connections, and for any business still paying for one, that is the part with money attached.

The two thresholds, briefly

Copper retirement runs on two gates. The first lets Openreach stop selling new copper lines in an exchange area once full fibre reaches 75 percent of premises there, with twelve months' notice of its intention. The second removes Ofcom's price controls from copper based services in that area, and until now it required 100 percent ultrafast coverage, 24 months since stop sell was introduced, and a further twelve months' notice.

What changed

Ofcom has decided to let Openreach exclude a fixed percentage of premises from that coverage requirement, and set the figure at 10 percent. Its decision reads: "We have decided to allow Openreach to exclude a fixed percentage of premises from the second threshold coverage requirement, and to set that fixed percentage at 10% of premises in an exchange area." In practice the second threshold is now met at 90 percent ultrafast coverage rather than 100. Ofcom also fixed a start date. The exclusions can only be applied from 1 April 2029, and before then the full 100 percent requirement stands.

The reasoning is that 100 percent is often not reachable. ISPreview listed the usual cases: apartment blocks where access is refused, wayleaves that cannot be obtained, farms sitting too far from the road, and premises already served by a rival network. Holding a whole exchange area open because of a handful of those means Openreach maintains two networks side by side indefinitely. Ofcom's argument, as ISPreview reported it, is that retiring the copper network frees up resources that can go into network improvements or lower prices over time.

Who this affects, and how

If everything in your business already runs over full fibre, this changes nothing for you. It matters if you still have copper based connections, and more firms have them than realise it. An ADSL or FTTC broadband line. A backup line. An alarm or lift line. A card machine line. A connection at a second site that nobody has looked at in years.

For those, the practical effect is that the date when the price of that connection stops being capped arrives earlier in more exchange areas than the old rule allowed. Ofcom did attach protections. Where full fibre is not available at a premises, the existing cap on the price of a copper based service stays in place. Where the copper cap is lifted, a charge control applies to full fibre connections instead. This is the end of protected pricing on copper in areas that are mostly fibre, rather than deregulation of the whole market.

What this is not

It is not the analogue phone switch-off. That is a separate programme on its own timetable and this decision does not change it. It is also not immediate. April 2029 is two and a half years away, and Ofcom said it will consider the conditions for further deregulation of copper services before its next market review period, with current thinking that full deregulation could start to take effect from 2031.

The useful work now is knowing what you have. Most businesses cannot produce a list of every line and circuit they pay for, which is precisely why old copper connections survive. They are small enough to overlook on a bill and nobody can say what they do. That question gets more expensive to leave unanswered every year.