Openreach’s Ultrafast FTTP Broadband Covers 435,000 UK Premises

Openreach’s (BT) Managing Director of Infrastructure Delivery, Kim Mears, has revealed that the telecoms giant has increased their UK coverage of 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband technology from 350,000 premises last year to 435,000 now and the ramp up continues.

The seemingly rapid increase in coverage reflects the national operator’s commitment to make pure fibre optic FTTP technology available to 2 million premises across the United Kingdom by 2020. The deployment phase for this has recently been ramping-up, although roughly half of the target reflects business connections and many of the rest are set to come from new build developments.

At present the fastest four speed profiles for ultrafast FTTP lines on Openreach’s network are 220Mbps download (20Mbps upload), 330Mbps (20-30Mbps up), 500Mbps (165Mbps up) and 1000Mbps (220Mbps up); most ISPs don’t offer the latter two as they’ve only recently been introduced. BTWholesale similarly expect to introduce a 160Mbps (30Mbps) and 330Mbps (50Mbps) profile during May 2017 to mirror the G.fast roll-out.

Kim Mears said (Kitz Forum):

“Less than a year ago, it was taking us an average of 50 days to provision Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) orders. That’s well over double the industry service level agreement (SLA) of 18 days. In some cases we had people waiting up to 200 days.

We knuckled down together to turn things around. We’ve started to change the way we work, introducing new tools and equipment. And with sheer bloody-mindedness, our Infrastructure Delivery team, CIO team, and chief engineer team have hammered average provision time down by 50% to just 21 days.

Not only that, but we’ve reduced the workstack and tails too – and our FTTP network availability is now at 99.5%. That means that when a customer wants to place an order, 99.5% of the time we’ve got the capacity ready and waiting to make it happen – and the processes and approach in place to deliver it fast.

We still have work to do to get to the industry standard of 18 days, but with big improvements planned over the next year, we’re confident our customers will soon notice the difference. “

However support among UK ISPs for Openreach’s native FTTP products is still weak, with nearly all of the other major broadband providers choosing to stick with their mass market hybrid-fibre (FTTC) and slow ADSL products (here). This may change as availability improves over the next few years, although the lack of a coverage plan beyond 2 million premises passed, not to mention the higher prices, may continue to hinder support.

Instead the big providers are much more likely to adopt ‘up to’ 330Mbps G.fast, which aims to cover 10 million premises by 2020 and possibly many more by 2025. Never the less you can still buy some reasonable FTTP packages on Openreach’s network from BT itself or ISPs like Zen Internet, iDNET and AAISP etc.

But don’t expect TalkTalk or Sky Broadband to join the club for a little while.