Summary

• Ofcom has proposed granting EXA Infrastructure UK powers under the Electronic Communications Code and is consulting until 5 October.
• Code status can simplify work on public land and gives operators a route to seek court-imposed rights where agreements with private landowners cannot be reached.
• The consultation shows how fibre expansion depends on legal access to land and infrastructure as much as transmission equipment or demand for bandwidth.

Ofcom is considering granting EXA Infrastructure UK statutory powers intended to make it easier to build and maintain communications networks, bringing the legal mechanics of land access into Europe’s continuing expansion of high capacity fibre infrastructure.

The regulator opened a consultation on 3 September proposing that EXA Infrastructure should become an operator under the Electronic Communications Code. Responses are due by 5pm on 5 October, after which Ofcom will decide whether to issue a direction applying the Code to the company.

Code powers give communications operators a defined legal framework for installing and maintaining infrastructure. Among other provisions, operators can carry out certain works on public streets without obtaining an individual street works licence, benefit from specified planning protections, and seek an agreement imposed by a court where they cannot reach terms with the owner or occupier of private land.

The consultation does not itself grant EXA those rights, nor would Code status allow the company simply to take possession of private property. Ofcom is considering the application under the Communications Act 2003, while disputes over particular sites can still require negotiation and, where agreement fails, a legal process before rights are imposed.

Fibre networks depend on rights beneath the map

EXA operates long distance fibre infrastructure connecting major European markets and transatlantic routes, serving hyperscale computing companies, carriers, content delivery networks, financial services, governments, and enterprises. The group says its network includes more than 23,000 kilometres of fibre and several subsea systems.

Long haul networks can appear deceptively simple on a coverage map, where cities and data centres are joined by neat lines. Building and maintaining those routes requires access to ducts, roads, railway corridors, landing sites, private property, exchange buildings, and other physical locations, each carrying separate engineering constraints, permissions, and commercial negotiations.

The Electronic Communications Code exists partly to prevent those negotiations becoming an absolute barrier to infrastructure that Parliament has decided carries wider public value. At the same time, the framework has to balance operators’ ability to extend networks against the interests of landowners, which is why disputes over private property remain subject to defined legal tests.

For network operators, Code status can reduce some of the friction associated with expansion and maintenance. That becomes more consequential as customers seek diverse routes between cloud regions, data centres, subsea cables, and large computing campuses, because resilience often depends on alternative physical paths rather than simply putting more capacity through an existing fibre.

AI demand is pulling connectivity into infrastructure planning

Data centre expansion across Europe is adding pressure to the networking layer surrounding computing facilities. AI clusters generate substantial volumes of traffic both inside data centres and between campuses, while cloud services, content platforms, and distributed enterprise systems continue to increase demand for high capacity links between major infrastructure hubs.

That creates a chain of dependencies that can be obscured when infrastructure investment is discussed primarily through processor numbers or data centre megawatts. New computing capacity also needs fibre routes, power connections, planning consent, physical access, and links into wider carrier networks before customers can use it effectively.

EXA’s application is narrow in regulatory terms but sits within that larger infrastructure expansion. Its network is designed around high capacity routes linking data centres and economic centres, including connections between Europe and North America, while the company continues to invest in capacity aimed at large bandwidth customers.

The UK section of that network carries particular value because London remains one of Europe’s major connectivity and cloud hubs and several subsea systems land on the British coast. Physical route diversity is commercially important to organisations that cannot tolerate a single civil engineering incident, equipment failure, or cable problem interrupting critical communications.

Statutory powers do not remove the cost or complexity of network construction. Operators still have to justify investment, secure planning and engineering resources, work within the Code’s legal framework, and build routes where customer demand can support the capital expenditure. Land rights solve one category of obstacle rather than the entire business case.

Ofcom must also decide whether granting the powers is appropriate under the statutory criteria before issuing a direction. The current consultation gives affected parties an opportunity to challenge or comment on the proposal, so the outcome remains open until the regulator has considered responses after 5 October.

If the powers are granted, EXA would join the communications providers able to use the Code when developing UK infrastructure. The decision would not produce a new fibre route overnight, but it would change the legal tools available when the company encounters the question that eventually confronts every physical network operator: how to place communications infrastructure through land it does not own.