Growing number of LLU lines in the UK

Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) has become an integral part of the UK broadband scenario. The number of unbundling lines in the UK has touched 2 millions by the end of March, 2007. LLU is a regulatory process of enabling the use of the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) like BT by various telecommunications operators in the UK.LLU provides the UK broadband users with the broadband services along with the products of LLU takers. Right from its inception in 2004, OTA (Office of Telecommunications Adjudicator) functions with an aim to improve the quality of LLU lines and facilitate the delivering of the products to the customers.Based on the older version of OTA, the new OTA2 will quickly implement the policies to ease the unbundling processes that benefit the companies involved as well as the end-users. In comparison with the shared access (SMPF) lines, the fully unbundled services performed less well last year with regard to the passing of services to the end-users. This could be a thrust area in the coming years. OTA also has to address a few problems in the coming years involving migration procedures in the LLU lines.More and more residential and SME lines are being unbundled every month and unbundled lines in the UK make up 10 percent of the total broadband connections in home and businesses, says the report by Ofcom.As a result of LLU and the increasing competition in the broadband market, the broadband prices have been slashed by 300 percent in the past three years. Many of the broadband providers in the UK offer cheap broadband connections with headline connection speeds ranging between 2 Mbit/s and 8 Mbit/s.

In addition, several broadband providers in the UK offer free broadband services for their customers along with other paid services.