The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has announced that they will NOT attempt to reintroduce a “temporary remedy” for Dark Fibre Access, which would have required BT (Openreach) to provide a restricted form of DFA in the leased line (Ethernet) markets for the period until March 2019. But DFA will be tried again.The originally proposed Dark Fibre Access (DFA) solution would have enabled rival ISPs to gain “physical access” to Openreach’s existing fibre optic cables (i.e. enabling them to install their own equipment at either end of the fibre within cable ducts). Several ISPs are known to have expressed a strong interest in using the service (TalkTalk, Three UK, Vodafone and SSE Enterprise Telecoms etc.).The regulator claimed that this new DFA, which they had initially rejected back in 2012 (here), could foster more competition and speed-up the roll-out of faster broadband services around the UK (e.g. backhaul capacity for new networks). However infrastructure builders, such as BT, Virgin Media, Cityfibre and Zayo, all warned that it could equally act to discourage investment in the construction of new fibre optic networks.
