UK ISP BT Retail has announced its latest results to 31st March 2010 and confirmed plans to extend their next generation fibre optic broadband ( FTTC , FTTH / P ) rollout to roughly "two-thirds of UK premises by 2015 for an incremental cost of around £1bn" (66% of the population); first reported last Saturday (here).

BT's current fibre optic deployment plan, which until today cost £1.5bn (now £2.5bn), remains on track. It will bring superfast (40-100Mbps) services within reach of 4 Million UK homes and businesses by the end of 2010 and be available to at least 40% (10 Million) premises by March 2012.

Sadly the BT Retail results did not include a figure for their broadband ISP subscribers, although we know that they have added 123,000 new customers in Q1-2010 and had a total of 5,008,000 during December 2009. As a result we can estimate that the total is now around 5,131,000 (we will update this later when BT has returned out hails BT confirmed this is correct).


The news that BT are seeking to extend their fibre optic broadband rollout will not come as much of a surprise to industry observers. Indeed the operator hinted that a figure of around 60% might be possible early last year, although no firm confirmation came until today.

However it's interesting to observe the language used by Ian Livingston, with phrases like "assuming an acceptable environment for investment" and words such as "potential" being thrown around. This hardly reads like a firm commitment, they're clearly waiting for the new government to outline its plans for supporting superfast broadband deployments.

Elsewhere BT confirmed that it would invest an additional £200m for 2010/11, which would be used to enhance their TV offering and support the faster than originally expected rollout of their existing fibre optic broadband service plans.

Frustratingly BT Retail did not reveal how many customers had signed up to their new 40Mbps FTTC based BT Infinity packages, though due to the limited fibre optic coverage we would expect uptake to be very low. The BT Vision ( IPTV ) customer base did at least grow a bit to 467,000 (it was 436k six month ago).

In April 2010 BT also signed a major agreement with Orange UK to take on the management and development of its UK fixed line broadband infrastructure for consumers and SMEs. Over the next 15
months BT will migrate Orange UK’s unbundled ( LLU ) customers to the BT Wholesale broadband platform.