Business Connectivity Market Review – Very Low Bandwidth Leased Lines

This document is a draft of the conclusions of our review of the retail market for very low bandwidth (VLB) leased lines in the UK, which forms part of the Business Connectivity Market Review 2016.

VLB leased lines provide dedicated, symmetric, data connections with either analogue interfaces or digital interfaces operating at bandwidths lower than 2Mbit/s. The most common services of this type are BT’s Analogue and Kilostream Private Circuits.

The volume of these services is declining rapidly as users replace them with modern alternatives and the underlying equipment is becoming obsolete.

We have decided to stop regulating the retail market for VLB leased lines in the UK (excluding the Hull area). We have reached this decision having found that sufficient modern alternatives exist for the remaining users of these services and that users are already migrating rapidly to alternatives services. We have also found that users that have not yet migrated have plans to do so in the next four years.

We have decided to continue regulating KCOM’s retail provision of VLB leased lines in the Hull area with some changes from the current regulations.

Operators of public services such as water and energy utilities use VLB leased lines to support vital systems. In this document we explain how we plan to ensure that operators of these essential public services are aware of BT’s plans to withdraw the services (as well as KCOM’s, should it decide to do the same), so that affected organisations can take timely steps to migrate to alternative services.

This draft statement is being notified to the European Commission for its comments. Once this notification process is complete, we will publish a final statement and a notification within the 2016 BCMR Statement to bring our decisions into effect.

Draft statement: Business Connectivity Market Review Very low bandwidth leased lines (PDF, 1.9 MB)