The BT Group has confirmed that they recently received their first upfront prepayment of £105m for the sale of leftover copper cables, which had been extracted from their legacy UK exchange network (broadband and phone lines) as part of the operator’s gradual move to replace those with newer fibre optic lines.
Just to recap. The group’s £15bn investment to roll-out Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based gigabit broadband ISP lines across the UK, which is being handled by Openreach, will ultimately be followed by the extraction of their older copper lines. BT has previously said that it is “confident” of being able to “recover” an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper from their old legacy network through the 2030s.
The first major step in this is the operator’s national Exchange Clearance Operation (ECO) programme, which is a BT Group initiative rather than an Openreach one and the copper being recovered will be from BT kit in the exchange, although it all feeds into the same overall task.
BT’s most recent Annual Report (June 2024) noted how the operator “continued recovering old or end-of-life network equipment to reuse or recycle, much of which was through our Exchange Clearance Operations programme. This year, we recovered 3,300 tonnes. We also agreed a deal with a leading bank and global recycler EMR to support the extraction and recycling of copper cable from our network until 2028.”
According to The Guardian, BT has now received £105m after entering into a forward agreement to sell copper granules created from the operator’s surplus copper cables, and more such payments will follow as the progress continues.
A spokesperson for Openreach said:
“As we look to recover and reuse scarce resources like copper in line with our commitment to sustainability, we estimate that as we replace old copper networks with fibre, we’ll be able to recover up to 200,000 tonnes of copper through the 2030s – in line with customer migrations.”
Estimates suggest that the group’s copper cables could, once fully extracted and sold, be worth up to £1.5bn by completion. But this does depend upon the quality of the copper, as well as ever-fluctuating market prices and additional costs (the high cost of extraction, middlemen fees etc.). After costs, BT may well get back a lot less than £1.5bn, although they’ll eventually also see some savings from a reduction in copper theft and related repairs from their network (fibre optic lines have no value to criminals).
Finally, it’s worth noting that Openreach will eventually only need around 1,000 “fibre” (FTTC, FTTP etc.) exchanges – Openreach Handover Points (OHPs) – and thus the operator is currently in the early stages of preparing for their Exchange Exit Programme, which will close around 4,600 UK exchanges that would not make economic sense to maintain. The first 100+ exchanges are due to close by 2030, but the rest will follow through the early 2030s.
The withdrawal of copper lines and exchanges is a slow process because it will take time to gradually migrate consumers and businesses over to the new network, which is a hugely complex process – one that requires existing customers to be supported (often for a few years after FTTP has arrived) so as to avoid disruptions in vital services.