Ofcom moves to take code powers off 19 telecoms firms
Ofcom wants to take code powers off 19 telecoms companies. Seven of them have already been closed or dissolved.
Code powers are the statutory rights that let a network operator carry out street works, put apparatus on public land, and run fibre through Openreach’s existing ducts and poles. They are permission to build. They are not permission to sell you broadband, and they are not the thing keeping your line running. Ofcom grants them on application and can take them back, and on 26 August it opened a consultation proposing to do that in 19 cases. Responses close at 5pm on 25 September.
Twelve of the companies asked. Ofcom says they notified the regulator that they no longer require the powers: Affiniti Integrated Solutions, Affinity Systems, Axione UK, GCI Network Solutions, Lightning Fibre, Meliora Networks, NGE Contracting, Obelisk Networks, Secure Web Services, Transmitair, Trenches Wayleave and Utilitas Power. The notice does not say why in any single case, and it is worth not reading one in. A takeover, a rebrand and a build that simply finished all look identical on a list like this.
The other seven are there because the company behind them has been closed or dissolved and so, in Ofcom’s words, is no longer the provider of a network at all. Those are Broadway Partners, Genesys Telecommunications, Omne Telecommunications, People’s Fibre, Spring Fibre, Sprintlink UK and Westnetworks Innovations.
Your broadband does not change because of any of this. Code powers govern building work, not the service running over a line that already exists. If your provider is still trading and still billing you, the notice does not touch your connection. ISPreview calls it administrative house cleaning. From the regulator’s side, that is fair.
What it is useful for is the thing underneath. A network announcing your town is not a network reaching your door, and a company can change hands or stop existing in the gap between the two. That is the real risk of buying from a name nobody has heard of, and our guide on whether altnets are safe covers what to look at before you sign. Waiting on a build that was promised and has not arrived? When full fibre reaches your street explains why announced dates slip. The availability checker is the only thing that knows what actually reaches your address today.
The gap in all this is that Ofcom’s notice is a list of company names and nothing else. It does not say which streets had work planned, whether anyone was left waiting for a network that is not coming, or where those customers ended up. Nineteen entries on a consultation page is the whole of the public record.