New standardised wayleave should speed up the deployment of superfast broadband in London

New standardised wayleave should speed up the deployment of superfast broadband in London

The City of London Corporation published this week a standardised wayleave agreement which should accelerate negotiations between landlords and broadband providers when agreeing to install fixed line broadband connections. Waiting time for business tenants to access high-speed internet connections should be significantly shortened.

The new template wayleave will allow landlords to agree much faster with broadband providers the details of access, installation, maintenance of network equipment in existing and new buildings. The legal toolkit developed by the Land Law Committee and the City of London Corporation was subject to a lengthy consultation process with stakeholders including London’s main property developers, landlords, broadband providers, Government, and trade associations.

The template wayleave agreement currently only covers fixed line connections to be installed in London properties. The BSG has collaborated with the City of London Corporation to help promote the use of this template and pushed for adoption of it to be an input into the WiredScore scoring criteria. We will also be championing its adoption in other cities and regions, should it prove to be successful.

Matthew Evans, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, said: “Securing agreement on a standardised wayleave is a big step forward for the telecoms and property industries – and most importantly for companies operating in London. High quality, reliable connectivity has been shown to drive productivity growth in all sectors of the economy. Without these connections, moving businesses critical applications to the cloud, home working and teleconferencing are often impossible for firms to do with confidence.???