Consultation: Business connectivity market review

  • Start: 02 November 2018
  • Status: Closed
  • End: 18 January 2019

Ofcom’s Business Connectivity Market Review (BCMR) examines the markets for the provision of leased lines in the UK. Leased lines are high speed, high-quality, point-to-point data connections that telecoms providers use for connecting offices, mobile base stations, and broadband access networks. As such, they are essential to support the provision of mobile, business, and residential broadband services and form the backbone of the UK’s digital infrastructure.

Every three years, Ofcom conducts a review of competition in the markets for the provision of leased lines in the UK. Where we find that a provider has “significant market power” (SMP) in a market (i.e. that they can act independently of competition) we impose regulations designed to address concerns about the impact of that market power on competition.

This document consists of two volumes with supporting annexes:

  • Volume 1 sets out our provisional analysis of business connectivity markets, identifies markets in which we propose to find that a provider has SMP, and sets out what remedies we propose to impose to address such SMP.
  • Volume 2 sets out our proposed detailed design of the price caps, as set out in the remedies sections of Volume 1, which aim to prevent excessive pricing where there is little prospect of competition developing.

The deadline for responses is 18 January 2019. Annexes 1 to 3 set out the process for responding to the consultation. We will take all responses to this consultation into account before reaching our final conclusions, which we expect to publish in spring 2019.

Update 24 May 2019: draft statement published

We have today published a draft statement on our review of the physical infrastructure and business connectivity markets. This has been submitted to the European Commission, which has a month to comment.

We expect to publish our final statement before the end of June 2019.


Main documents

Supporting documents

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Responses

Responder name Type
BT Group (PDF File, 2.5 MB) Organisation
BUUK Infrastructure (PDF File, 283.0 KB) Organisation
CityFibre (PDF File, 674.3 KB) Organisation
Colt (PDF File, 97.6 KB) Organisation
Communication Workers Union (PDF File, 147.1 KB) Organisation
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