Business Connectivity Market Review: Further consultation

We are currently conducting a review of competition in the provision of leased line services in the UK.

Leased lines provide dedicated symmetric transmission capacity between fixed locations, and their overall value exceeds £2bn per annum in the UK. They play an important role in business communications services and are used to support a wide variety of applications, both in the private and public sectors. They also play a significant role in delivering fixed and mobile broadband services to consumers, because communications providers use them extensively in their networks.

On 18 June 2012, we published our business connectivity market review consultation (June BCMR Consultation) in which we set out our market analysis for, and assessment of, each market that we had identified in relation to the provision of leased line services in the UK. As a result of our analysis of the market conditions, we set out a number of proposals, put broadly:

• to identify and define a number of relevant wholesale and retail product markets in certain geographical areas of the UK;
• to determine that each of BT and KCOM has significant market power (SMP) in a number of those markets; and
• to impose remedies on BT and KCOM, in the form of proposed SMP services conditions and directions under these conditions, to address the nature of the competition problems we had identified in each of the relevant markets where we considered that there is not effective competition.