Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of encouraging all communications providers to offer services across existing incumbent and independent fibre networks.

It is the government's view that the best way to achieve nationwide gigabit coverage is to create a competition-friendly environment in areas where deployment is commercially viable.

Regulations set by the independent regulator Ofcom on operators with significant market power - Openreach and KCOM - enable other operators to access their networks to deploy services in certain circumstances. In addition, networks which are rolled out due to government subsidy regimes including Superfast and Project Gigabit are required to offer wholesale access.

As a result of this approach, there is now a thriving market of over 80 providers rolling out gigabit broadband all over the UK across many existing incumbent and independent fibre networks.

However, where network operators choose to deploy their services and over which networks Internet Service Providers choose to offer their services is ultimately a commercial matter.