Fixing the Last Mile? How UK telecommunication engineers are responding to industrial change.

Cathy Nugent, MRes Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Introduction

In telecommunications, the “Last Mile” – also known as the access network, or the “local loop” – refers to the fixed network (the cables and wires) that run between a local telephone exchange and homes, businesses and public buildings1. My research into changes in UK telecommunications is situated in this Last Mile. I have been looking at the urban fabric around a local exchange in north Southwark, south London – roughly a square mile area where public land is being sold off to make way for the development of offices and flats. This is preparation for fieldwork, looking at the work of customer service and construction telecoms engineers and how that work interacts with the urban economy. Early on in the current research I realised that logistics industries also had a “Last Mile” and this led me to ask the following questions. What kind of economic and social space is Last Mile? What is the role of telecommunications in the recent phase of globalisation? How does that role relate to the development of other industries such as logistics?

For the logistics industry, the Last Mile is the final leg of the journey of a product to its destination, whether that be to a retailer or single customer. With the growth in direct-to- consumer deliveries, the Last Mile has become a more important segment of logistics (Gevaers et al, 2011). The management of profitability and efficiency is important in both Last Miles. And as both Last Miles have a high density of activities – many deliveries, many network connections – they are areas of labour intensive work (although as Last Mile workers often work alone, this work may not appear to be labour intensive). Therefore there are many impacts on, and issues for, labour and labour organising in the Last Mile.

I have been working with a London branch of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) and union responses to industrial change will be an important part of the next phase of research. CWU officers have told me a lot about about the history, work and technology of the industry. This paper will draw on exploratory interviews with those participants.

The CWU has a high density of members (80-90% among non-managerial grades) and is fully recognised in the former state monopoly, BT, which owns a large part of the UK’s fixed

1 See Appendix for a diagram of the telecommunications Last Mile.

1 network. The CWU has members in many other telecommunication companies, but no formal recognition. (The CWU was derecognised at Virgin Media in 2012.) In contrast, in logistics unionisation is patchy, or worse. The August 2016 strike of London Deliveroo workers has shown however, that the precarious workers at the Last Mile end of logistics are not unorganisable. Clearly, the organising work of the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) union is very different to the CWU, although both groups use targetted recruitment and information campaigns at or around workplaces.2

This paper has three sections. The first describes the potential consequences – technological, political and economic - arising from reforms to UK telecommunications initiated by government regulator Ofcom. These changes form the backdrop to my research. The second section looks at some correlations between the telecommunications industry and logistics. The third discusses how telecommunication’s Last Mile compares with that of logistics. I conclude with some observations about the situation of labour in both areas.

Telecommunications and the city

After a 2016 public debate involving MPs, the media, telecoms companies and the CWU, Ofcom concluded that the introduction of “fibre to the premises” (FTTP) in the UK was long overdue and should be pushed through (Ofcom, 2016b). BT has largely replaced traditional cooper wiring with fibre beyond the local loop, but inside the local loop, copper still dominates. Fully-fibre enabled services are available to just 2% of UK homes and businesses. This contrasts very unfavourably with countries like Japan, Spain and South Korea where 60-70% of premises have fully-fibre enabled services (Ofcom, 2016b). Fibre optic cabling enables much faster broadband services than traditional copper wiring (up to 1 Gigabyte per second). And it is broadband services which underpins modern telecommunications and telematics (i.e. the transmission of computer-generated and receivable data).

However, in the Ofcom debate, Openreach, the BT subsidiary which maintains BT’s local loop, became the object of a political problem. The argument went: Openreach isn’t independent of BT; it isn’t providing a good enough service to BT’s retail customers (BT effectively rents the use of its networks to other telecommunication companies);

2. See, https://iwgbclb.wordpress.com/.

2 Openreach will block upgrading to FTTP. Ofcom decided to encourage investment in fibre from companies other than BT, that is, to encourage competition with BT. This will be facilitated by taking control of the local loop out of BT’s hands, and making Openreach a separate company (Ofcom, 2016b). Openreach separation is now a certainty. The CWU have agreed in principle not to oppose it, although it will involve a TUPE transfer of 32,000 workers from BT to Openreach3. Previously the CWU had feared an increase in job insecurity and loss of pension rights (CWU, 2016).

Discourses around modern telecommunications, around fibre optics, ultra-fast broadband and “big data” are often posed in very high-stakes terms. For example, Ofcom stresses the strategic importance of the FTTP project for UK economic development (Ofcom, 2016). And a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a fusion of technologies resting on advanced digital connectivity — has been hailed by some MPs as the next big technological leap forward (Hansard, 8 September 2016). These high stakes are framing the pushing through of FTTP and breaking-up of BT’s monopoly. It has also put the local loop, the Last Mile, under the spotlight, as a site which brings together economic interests, technological developments and political debates.

One of my CWU participants, Philip, described the Ofcom intervention as an attempt to make the local loop, and Openreach itself, into a utility, an enabler of services. Another participant, Nadia, says, “Openreach is a conduit for the market and the market is expressed through it.” But the restructuring may be aimed at, or at least have the effect of, forcing Openreach itself to expand its FTTP “offer”. Indeed Openreach are already committed to installing FTTP for all “new builds”4

These reforms depend on an interplay of the state (and state actors such as Ofcom) with the telecommunications economy. On the one hand the state (through Ofcom) is heavily involved in the planning of telecoms. On the other hand Ofcom’s reform is a drive to expand competition, to free the industry from state planning. The scene for this interplay has been set by the prehistory of the industry (and BT) in the standardised and universalistic Postal, Telegraph and Telephone services model which dominated most of the 20th century, in large parts of the world. After 1981 privatisation deregulation, market competition, new firms, new products and so on, were accompanied by (not to say caused

3 See, http://www.cwu.org/media/press-releases/2017/march/10/cwu-pleased-uncertainty-on-openreach- has-ended-as-bt-and-ofcom-reach-agreement-on-future-governance/ 4 See, https://www.ournetwork.openreach.co.uk/news/more-new-build-sites-to-get-fttp-connection-for- free.aspx.

3 by) technological innovation (Hulsink, 1999). Yet a really important innovation, in fibre optic technology, (technology which has been around since the 1960s), has never been introduced into the UK network. Arguably, this is because, for most of that time, only the state could provide the scale of investment required. Through these years of what one participant call “wild west telecoms” (of speculative business, short-lived ventures, mergers and buy-ups), the former state monopoly BT has kept its dominant position. Indeed it managed to consolidate that position last year when it bought the mobile phone operator EE5. The industry is oligopolistic; there are a very few big telecommunication firms and an ever-changing pool of smaller firms, operating individually, or in joint ventures, to provide niche or limited services.

For CWU activists Maria Exall and Gary Heather (2015), there is something inevitable about monopoly dynamics and continuing state intervention:

“Telecoms is an essential public service and a natural monopoly. This is borne out in telecoms by the natural re-integration of rival operators in both the core and local loop networks since their enforced separation under privatisation... Competition has proved wasteful in terms of mis-spent investment on network duplication and over capacity, while necessary investment in the broadband network of the future has been neglected. The major investment necessary to develop the future telecoms technologies will not be undertaken by the private sector without guaranteed returns.”

Therefore, it may be that only BT, as the largest fixed broadband provider (32% market share in 2015) has the capacity to provide fibre6. But will it be inclined to, or able to, if Openreach, which will have to do the work, has been separated off?

The possibility could be further impeded by the tricky and difficult construction work involved – of putting fibre cables under pavements and roads and into buildings in old cities like London. That has been a problem everywhere governments, industry and city authorities have tried to undertake such work (Graham, 2004: 139).

5 www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35320831

6. Other big companies in broadband are Sky, Virgin Media (a subsidiary of the multi-national Liberty Global), and Talk Talk. Other big mobile interests in the UK are O2, Vodaphone and Three. Both bigger and smaller broadband providers rent the use of BT’s physical infrastructure. The exception is Virgin because it owns the fibre optic infrastructure which was built in the 1980s to pipe cable TV into UK homes. [Explain how that derailed FTTP project]. Smaller providers also rent use of the bigger providers mobile infrastructures (Ofcom 2016a).

4 As already stated, the network beyond the UK local loop, beyond local telephone exchanges is already fibre. And, in fact, the network from local exchanges to street cabinets (the green, grey and black boxes that can be seen on street corners) is already fibre7. According to my informant Nadia, the work of laying fibre to the street cabinet in recent years has been routine. Fibre “pipes” can be blown down those ducts which carry the wires and cables to the street cabinet. However, putting in fibre cables from street cabinets to premises, will be tricky. According to Leslie, who was a planner before the job became desk-bound, an engineer who would have worked “in the field” solving engineering problems, the ducts through which cooper wire now runs in the last section of the network, from the cabinet onwards, are often blocked, or have been redirected in strange ways due to street construction, building and renovations, over years.

Making the links

Yet the on-the-ground difficulties of integrating legacy and new technologies may only temporarily impede the processes driving the FTTP upgrade. To understand these processes better I have been looking at how telecommunications is linked to globalisation. Then, to expand this line of enquiry, I have looked about how it might facilitate or correlate with logistics (ports, transport, warehousing), an infrastructure which relies on “real time” connectivity.

There is a variety of literature that addresses the transformative force of communication technology. Castells (2013) argues that communication technology has strengthened and created new network forms of society organisation, which have always been present in human history. These networks jostle for predominance or exist alongside class, bureaucracy, hierarchy and state forms of power distribution. Easterling (2014) describes the transforming effects of the landing of submarine fibre optic cables to Kenya; how this has led to the explosion of mobile phone use, which are connecting villages to cities. These fibre optic networks are not just inert cables but long chains of hardware, software, and the embodiment of human labours, stretching across very long distances and carrying with them histories and social life. They are marvels of communication, innovation and co- operation. Sassen (2000) argues the capacity of telecommunications to both disperse communication widely and to centralise control is key. The changing role of cities, as

7. Diagram in appendix shows different sections of the network.

5 centres, as social and economic hubs within the global context are being significantly shaped by this facility embedded in telecommunications.

None of these scholars ignore issues of power and inequality in their accounts, quite the opposite, but they may, argues telecommunication scholars Graham and Marvin (1997) a fail to see the “real world” complexities of telecommunications itself. And this may be, say Graham and Marvin, precisely because it is such an invisible infrastructure. Those who have theorised about big picture global telecommunications have sometimes, argues Graham, fallen into “’information age’ utopianism” (2004, 6). A more grounded approach would look at how telematics, computing and telecoms technologies together, are integrated into and flow from the demands of already-existing social life. Certainly, this more grounded approach is more suited to my particular interest in the labour of telecommunications.

Despite the democratising potentialities of the submarine fibre cables now circling the globe, under liberalised telecommunications, these cables tend to link up big customers and wealthy areas around the world. The big news of the Fourth Industrial Revolution seems like hype because any post-modern sensibilities we may have had about technology, have long been squashed by grim reality. As Graber argues, information technology has been harnessed not so much to the making of cyborgs, but ensuring “the daughters of Mexican and Indonesian farmers” could make “high tech sneakers… on the equivalent of old-fashioned Singer sewing machines” (2015: 112).

On the other hand, telecommunications is not only driven or pieced together through the informational needs and transactions of big business. It is also shaped by its history, public sector ethics, ideas about universal provision and our love affairs with the net. Moreover, both public interests, however they are notionally defined (e.g. the government’s commitment to, a very low, minimum broadband bandwith), and private interests continued to be managed by state regulation.

The “logistics revolution” in contrast to the “telecommunications revolution” was thoroughly “real”. It is rooted in a shift in power from producers and manufacturers to retailers, changes in forms of production and the global redistribution of production, a drive for speedy and would-be perfect distribution systems and systemic changes in the way that labour is required to perform (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008). Telecommunications, the development of its technologies and capabilities are undoubtedly bound up with and helped these processes, but this statement needs unpicking.

6 Both industries are concerned with “circulation” and distribution – logistics with “stuff” and telecommunications with information and data. And for both logistics and telecommunications it is the possibilities of transforming time, space and territory that are important in their modes of circulation. Rightly, Cowen has linked this particular transforming capacity to the capitalist logics which aim, have always aimed, to speed up the circulation of goods (2014: introduction).

Perhaps we can say both telecommunications and logistics are special kinds of networked infrastructures which cut through the world, and across national boundaries making important economic activities possible. For example, Cowen (2014) describes how logistics have forged new trade gateways and corridors and smoothed the circulation of goods in very serious ways. So much so, she argues, we must “engage our present as fundamentally a time of logistics space”. Focusing on space, we could map chains of circulation in goods, money, expertise and people through the informational links they make. There will be inventories for all these things, in real time, but in cyber space, tracking through from shore to ship, back to shore again. The kinds of technologies involved will rely on high speed, high data capacity fibre. Other telecommunications – radio (for RFID), satellite (for GPS tracking), wireless (for monitoring stuff on the go) and broadband (for keeping in touch with customers via social media) will be there too. But all of these other networks of telecommunications will at certain points converge with fibre optic networks. It is not surprising therefore to see BT offers a package telecommunication “products” which map onto the management of global supply chains.8

To emphasise, it is the convergence of fast and reliable telecommunications (based on fibre optic technology) with digital media (e.g. mobile-phone enabled instant payments) which makes telecommunications such a powerful accelerator of circulation (Manzerolle and Kjøsen, 2012). Although an instant payment facility will never mean instant shipping, docking and trucking, is the technology shaping consumer expectations, creating an expectation of instant delivery? Are such unrealistic expectations, engendered by fibre optic communication, contributing to impossible “speed ups” in both industries? These questions lead into looking at the Last Mile.

Fixing the Last Mile

8. See, http://www.globalservices.bt.com/uk/en/industries/logistics.

7 The Last Mile is a space in which the activity of travelling from A to B and completing jobs within a time frame structures patterns of work. Allocating the time allotted to travel and for job completion are two points of tension; there will always be attempts to squeeze the timings of these activities. Logistics businesses, where workers deliver to and may interact with customers – retail distribution, courier firms, Deliverooo, the Post Office etc. – all need travel routes to be uncongested and jobs to done quickly (with the partial exception of the Post Office). The expectations are largely the same for “customer interfacing” Openreach engineers.

Telecommunications (email, data file transmission) has become itself another speedy form of delivery. Sometimes though, when digitalisation is not possible, logistics workers, cycle messengers, step in. As Jeffrey Kidder’s workplace ethnography (2008) shows these cycle messengers have to be super-quick:

“... many items crucial to post-industrial production cannot currently be digitized. For example, firms dealing with architectural blueprints, advertising proofs, court filings, film, garment bags, legal documents, medicine, and model portfolios still use real (i.e., material) objects. Even for items that technically can be transmitted digitally (e.g., advertising proofs and court filings), in most cases hard copies are still preferred (designers want to see the exact colors being replicated and law firms want physically stamped copies of their briefs as proof of delivery). As such, the Informational Age requires real highways, not just informational ones. More to the point, while companies like DHL, Fedex, and UPS can deliver items around the globe in under 24 hrs, it is the bike messenger who offers the fastest delivery times within the city.”9

In cities especially, the Last Mile space-time squeeze is frustrated by real-world frictions – congested routes, unanticipated wear and tear on the network, the weather...

9. The pleasure cycle messengers find in trying to defy space and time is interesting. Kidder: “If we extend the scope of autonomy to include the moment-to-moment choices bike messengers make as they are riding through traffic, however, we can really start to see why so many messengers find their labor meaningful. It is not simply having freedom from oversight; it is the freedom to act creatively and spontaneously as they navigate the city’s streets. Further, there are real, mortal consequences to the messenger’s actions. Cutting left or swerving right around a car can literally make the difference between life and death. When creativity and spontaneity are coupled with mortal danger, action becomes inherently authentic. Few things are (or quite possibly nothing is) more mentally engaging and emotionally engrossing than survival. This is why some people eat up their life savings to climb mountains and jump out of airplanes. Messengers are able to realize this sort of “edgework” (as social psychologist Stephen Lyng calls it) during their paid labor. Thus, unlike the fry cook at a fast food restaurant or the office assistant making photocopies, the messenger’s labor can feel profoundly meaningful.” (Kidder, 2008)

8 A Dublin Deliveroo worker describes their work:

“Quite frequently, the allocations they give you are very impractical. A very recent example; I was in Ballsbridge and allocated to travel over to Stoneybatter. Drops like this usually involve cycling across the city to the restaurant, locking up my bike, waiting, receiving and packing the food, cycling to whatever address, which in some cases are in apartments, maybe ringing the customer on my phone at my own expense, waiting for the customer to come down and complete the transaction. Jobs like this can take upwards of 45 minutes, then I need to mark myself as available and cycle to whatever my pickup is going to be, hopefully, close by.”10

And my participant Nadia told me about the working life of a BT Openreach engineer:

“BT engineers get their jobs in the morning by I-phone, before they set off for work. It will be exactly the same for Sky and Virgin engineers (although some of those non-BT engineers are employed by contractors). The engineers have to repair, install, interact with the access network and also the customers. Local knowledge is important; how to get from A to B but also what the physical state of the network is like. There are complex systems for recording jobs and monitoring their progress. And predictive tools for how things get should get fixed and how long things should take. If the job takes longr than predicted then there the engineer has to account for it. Customers (Openreach retail customers) are waiting impatiently to get their jobs done. If something does wrong – and any number of things could go wrong - an engineer is on their own.”

What can go wrong? Another participant, Will, explains:

“Engineers may not have the right tools. Customers may be out and the engineer won’t be able to get access. Parts of the network may be in a particularly bad way and the job simply takes longer than expected.”

We are all entangled with the processes of speeding up work and the frictions involved as well. This is evident in the Last Mile in the how the “not at home” problem affects us and affects Last Mile workers. In the past consumers might order something through a mail order company, but be not at home when the goods were delivered by a postal worker. We might have waited until the weekend to go down to the local Sorting Office to pick up the goods. Or we rang the Post Office to get the goods redelivered. Or our postal worker knew

10. See, www.rabble.ie/2016/07/20/a-taste-of-the-future/

9 which neighbour would be in and would take in the parcel. Innovations in Last Mile logistics have introduced more “convenient”, supposedly frictionless ways for consumers to deal with the “not at home” problem, but the costs are put on the consumer. These include picking up the goods at a shop linked to an online business, using a reception box, or nipping to the open-all-hours corner shop which is part of a “click and collect” network (Gavaers et al, 2011).

There is a “not at home” problem for Last Mile telecommunication workers, but the frictions can only be absorbed by both consumers and ultimately by workers. It has also helped create Openreach’s “bad reputation” and that has copper-bottomed Ofcom’s intervention. Another informant, George, told me:

“In the past if an engineer got to the job and found the customer was out they would spend some time trying to find a work round; they would speak to a neighbour and try and get access that way. With the clock running engineers more usually leave jobs quickly. That means that the job is left uncompleted and has to be rebooked. These problems occur because of the way the network has been unbundled for use by so many different providers. When you complain to Talk Talk about your job not getting done, probably because they have messed up the booking, Talk Talk passes on those complaints to Ofcom, blaming Openreach. Engineers feel the consequences of these problems, they have less and less time to do jobs properly, because the jobs are stacked up, and the fixing the network itself becomes more complicated.”

Better understanding of how we the consumers, the people who impatiently tap on our smart phones to buy stuff, are entangled in the work of the Last Mile, might help shift the terms of the debate. If we were to reconceptualise the work of Tesco delivery drivers and telecoms engineers, so that deliveries and installations are not just “bought and paid for” fleeting services, but acts of care, making sure we can eat, or be in touch with our friends, would we behave differently? Instead of arguing with the Talk Talk call centre worker when our broadband installation goes wrong, might we insist that Talk Talk employs more staff and better communicates with Openreach? Instead of angrily or even strategically boycotting Deliveroo, why not directly pay the staff for the time it takes to deliver our food? As things stand, as we engage with both logistics and telecommunications as impatient consumers, the labour involved in getting our stuff done, remains obscure.

10 Conclusions

By forcing the status of “consultants” on its workers Deliveroo has been trying to avoid paying even minimum wages. This is a business model analogous to Amazon’s crowdsourced labour, recently highlighted by Trebor Scholz (2015) which not only hides the labour involved in its business, but literally hides the human beings in which labour is embodied.

Indirectly, telecommunication workers are helping to create such online platforms, as they build as Scholz puts it, “the affordances of cloud computing”. So should telecoms workers be seen as privileged? I don’t think so. Ofcom’s intervention and reorganisation shows how workers in global supply, chains, logistics workers and telecommunication workers are all linked together through the ways capitalism is organised.

In global supply chain manufacturing outsourcing, parent companies, both producers and retailers, have pushed through a “race to the bottom” driving down workers’ terms and conditions. The separation of Openreach can be seen as a way to create a clearer outsourced relationship between Openreach and its “parents” - Sky, Vodaphone, Talk Talk or one of around 300 internet, mobile, specialist organisations. Openreach remains a single company but the combined pressure of its customers, could drive through cheaper pricing (so they can cut their sales staff), or more fibre optic availability for the customers they want to target. That will impact on the workforce as it has in the past, through other reorganisations of BT and telecommunications since privatisation. The introduction of competition has been associated with a great deal of job insecurity and the “flexibilisation” of work conditions (Blissert, 2013, Miozzo and Ramirez, 2003). On the other hand Openreach remains a single company with an intact workforce of 32,000, and expanding workforce11 and a high level of unionisation. How can the unions use their strategic strength? Will a further casualised workforce really be compatible with getting the skilled work of the upgrade, if it happens, completed? The next stage of my research will track these developments.

11 See, https://www.homeandwork.openreach.co.uk/news/200317-openreach-embraces-virtual-reality-to-hire-1-500- trainee-engineers.aspx

11 References

Blissert, E, 2013. Inside the Unions: A comparative analysis of policy-making in Australian and British printing and telecommunication trade unions. PhD Thesis, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University.

Bonacich, Edna and Jake B. Wilson, 2008. Getting the Goods, Ports, Labor and the Logistics Revolution.

Castells, Manuel, 2013. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cowen, Deborah, 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping the Violence of Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Communication Workers Union, 2016. Ofcom Digital Communications Review — a CWU perspective. (www.cwu.org/media/7965/member-communication-new.pdf)

Easterling, Keller, 2014. Extrastatecraft, the Power of Infrastructure Space. London & New York: Verso.

Exall, Maria and Heather, Gary 2015. Telecommunications of the future under public ownership. Available at http://l-r-c.org.uk/files/p16_Exall+Heather.pdf

Gavaers, Roal, Van de Voorde, Eddy & Vanelslander, Thierry, 2011. Characteristics and Typology of Last Mile Logistics from an Innovation Perspective in an Urban Context. In City Distribution and Urban Freight Transport, edited by Cathy Machais and Sandra Melo. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Graeber, David, 2015. The Utopia of Rules, on Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn and London: Melville House.

Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon, 1997. Telecommunications and the city, electronic spaces, urban places. London and New York: Routledge.

Graham, Stephen, 2004. ‘Excavating the Material Geographies of Cybercities’. In The

Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham. London & New York: Routledge.

Graham, Stephen, ed, 2004. The Cybercities Reader. London & New York: Routledge.

Hulsink, Willem, 1999. Privatisation and Liberalisation in European Telecommunications Comparing Britain, the Netherlands and France. London and New York: Routledge.

12 Kidder, Jeffrey, L., 2008. ‘Appropriating the city: space, theory and bike messengers.’ In Theory and Society, 38:3, pp. 307-328. Available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-008-9079-8 Manzerolle, Vincent R. and Kjøsen, Atle Mikkola (2012). The Communication of Capital: Digital Media and the Logic of Acceleration. Triple C, 2(14), pp. 214-229.

Miozzo, M., Ramirez, M, 2003. Services Innovation and the Transformation of Work: the case of UK telecommunications. New Technology, Work and Employment 18: 1 pp. 62-79.

Ofcom, 2016a. Communications Market Report. Ofcom, 2016b. Making communications work for everyone. (stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk) Ofcom, 2016b. Making communications work for everyone. ( stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk )

Sassen, Saskia, 2000. Globalisation and Telecommunications. Impacts on the Future of Urban Centrality. Urban Forum: 11:2, pp. 185-200.

Scholz, Trebor, 2015. Think outside the boss. Available at www.publicseminiar.org.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Hansard, Volume 614, 8 September 2016. (https://hansard.parliament.uk)

13 Appendix

This illustrates a very simplified topology of a telephone/broadband network within an urban area. The Last Mile (shaded green) is the section which runs between a local exchange and premises. The Last Mile comprises two sections. The first section runs from local exchanges to street cabinets. Street cabinets are located on many street corners in urban areas, serving between 80- 200 premises (homes and businesses). The second section (marked in yellow) runs from the street cabinet to premises, via underground ducts or overhead poles. At the local exchange the Last Mile is joined to the core network (circled in red here). There will be many layers and repeats of this network pattern across a national terrain and across national borders.

14