Vodafone – Just 6.5% of UK Homes Covered via FTTP Broadband by 2020

A new Vodafone commissioned study from Point Topic has predicted that only 6.5% of UK households can expect to be covered by Gigabit (1000Mbps+) capable FTTP/H fibre optic broadband cables by 2020, but other data from Point Topic forecasts a figure of 9.4% when business premises are included.

At present just shy of 2% of premises in the United Kingdom have been covered by a Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP/H) based pure fibre optic broadband service, including 330,000 premises passed via Openreach’s (BT) national network and the rest from alternative network (AltNet) providers.

However Vodafone warns that only 6.5% of UK households can expect to receive gigabit-capable fibre-optic cables by 2020 and they claim that BT’s focus on 330Mbps hybrid-fibre G.fast technology will only improve UK “ultrafast broadband” coverage by around 3.78%, largely due to the presence of Virgin Media’s similarly capable Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network in many of the same urban areas. We’ve pasted the full results at the bottom of this article, which includes a breakdown of forecast FTTP/H coverage across the UK’s various regions.

At this point we note that Vodafone fails to strictly define the speed for “ultrafast“, but since they reference it alongside Virgin and BT’s G.fast then we’ll assume it reflects the a top speed of around 100-300Mbps+. Meanwhile “Gigabit” performance is more strictly associated with FTTP/H, at least for now, and usually means 1000Mbps+ (1Gbps or faster).

Vodafone also claims that 80% of homes in Sweden and Spain are “already passed by fibre” and in Portugal the figure is now above 60%. Portugal and Spain are apparently expected to get to 95% FTTP coverage by 2020, which is well above the UK but then linear country-to-country comparisons are tricky animals to fairly balance. Sadly the EU’s own data is now woefully out of date (here).

Helen Lamprell, Vodafone’s UK Director of External Affairs, said:

“We call upon BT to be up-front with the British public about its roll out plans and acknowledge that G.Fast will do nothing to help those stranded on archaic and woefully inadequate broadband today.

BT is pushing a muddled compromise rooted in the past, while the rest of the world is focused on building the Gigabit Society at light speed over fibre.”

As usual some of the points that Vodafone make require a little clarification. The first thing we’d say is that BT’s G.fast deployment has made no secret of the fact that it’s a commercial project and will focus on rolling out to economically viable urban areas, which should largely mirror Virgin Media’s own reach (i.e. BT’s primary infrastructure competition in the urban space).

The Government has already hinted that they may eventually need to recreate something similar to today’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, which would be needed in order to help push ultrafast broadband technology beyond the low hanging fruit of urban and busy sub-urban areas.

Vodafone’s criticism of BT’s G.fast deployment is also a touch weak unless they themselves are similarly willing to commit clear funding to help deliver truly universal FTTP, but in practice Vodafone would face many of the same economic and engineering challenges in doing non-urban areas as BT; irrespective of Openreach’s future status as independent or not.

However we do know that G.fast and FTTP from BT will later be pushed out to “most” UK homes by 2025 and ISPreview.co.uk has previously predicted that such a roll-out would be similar in scope to BT’s commercial FTTC deployment, potentially reaching around 60-70% UK coverage. On the other hand Openreach has yet to set a solid target for their post-2020 strategy.

Another problem is that Vodafone’s figures are focused on “households” and Point Topic informs ISPreview.co.uk that this excludes business premises, which is a key distinction. The predicted FTTP/H coverage figure of 6.4% in Vodafone’s report thus rises to 9.4% when you look at total coverage (premises passed), including both homes and businesses.

Here’s what Point Topic actually predicts for the UK (overall total coverage) by 2020 and then also 2025, with the “Net premises” figure below reflecting the total in terms of “ultrafast broadband” coverage (note: Point Topic define this as 100Mbps+, rather than the 300Mbps+ mooted by Ofcom).

The above also reflects the fact that BT has already promised to make their own Gigabit capable FTTP network available to 2 million UK premises by 2020 and Virgin Media has just set a similar target for 2019 (total of around 4 million).

Meanwhile Alternative Network (AltNet) ISPs have so far been able to deliver around 400,000 – 650,000 premises passed via FTTP/H/B (here), depending upon which set of figures you believe. There’s also a rather overly optimistic prediction from INCA that, with the right support, AltNet’s could reach 4.9 million premises by 2020.

If all of the above pans out then FTTP coverage by 2020 could be a fair bit stronger than the 9.4% currently predicted, potentially rising to around 20-30%. Otherwise here are the figures from Vodafone, make of them what you will but remember these are only for “households“.

UPDATE 1:50pm

Point Topic has now released a bit more detail on the overall figures, which splits the household (HH) and business (Bus.) coverage.