Openreach Name Next 11 UK Areas for FTTP Ultrafast Broadband

Telecoms operator Openreach (BT) has today revealed the next batch of 11 areas that will benefit from their roll-out of 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP infrastructure in 2019, which should cover 3 million UK homes and businesses by the end of 2020. Plus 3,000 extra engineers will be added.

At present Openreach’s “full fibre” network covers 682,000 premises (here) but last year the operator made a significant “Fibre First” commitment to ramp this up, which is supported by their recent move to hire an additional 3,500 engineers (here). As a result they’re now adding more than 13,000 extra premises to FTTP each week (this is expected to rise quite a bit during 2020 to hit the targets).

Technically speaking Openreach has been rolling out FTTP since 2008/9, although that was only a very limited deployment and had plenty of teething problems. By comparison the more recent Fibre First effort has already announced or started a much more significant roll-out in Coventry, Belfast, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Swansea and The Wirral.

Going forward Openreach has also consistently expressed an aspiration to cover 10 million UK premises by around 2025, albeit at a cost of between £3bn to £6bn (full details). However this desire is still dependent upon Ofcom agreeing to support softer regulation, reduced logistical barriers (improved planning, wayleaves etc.) and the ability to switch-off old copper networks as areas move to FTTP (expensive and complex) etc.

We should add that some of the above requested changes have already filtered down as part of the Government’s Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review (FTIR), although we’re still awaiting the announcement of a solid agreement on the 10 million aspiration.

11 New Openreach FTTP Areas for 2019

The big news today is that Openreach has decided to announce 11 new locations where it will be building new FTTP networks during the whole of 2019, which is a big change because until now we had become use to the operator taking a much more piecemeal (unveiled one-by-one) approach to such announcements. But there’s more.

For the first time, they also plan to publish information on their website detailing build plans for the next 12 months, including the total number of exchange areas to be reached in each location. It will also publish details of the specific exchanges where FTTP is currently being built, has already been built, or it intends to start building within the next three months (all of this data will be reviewed on a quarterly basis).

The New Locations
Bury
Barking & Dagenham
Bexley
Croydon
Greater Glasgow
Harrow
Merton
Redbridge
Richmond upon Thames
Salford
Sutton Coldfield

On top of this Openreach currently employs 24,282 field engineers and, as stated above, they hired another 3,500 new engineers last year. The good news is that they’ve now announced their plans for recruiting a further 3,000 new engineers – of which around 1,600 are newly created roles – over the next 12 months.

The 3,000 roles include (across Openreach’s ten service delivery regions) 226 roles in Scotland; 346 in the North East (inc. Yorkshire and Humber), 277 in the North West, 280 in North Wales & the North Midlands, 419 in East Anglia, 306 in South Wales & the South Midlands, 334 in the South East, 428 in London, 389 in South Central and 262 in the South West.

The business is creating 12 similar regional training centres across the UK in Bradford, Bolton, Crawley, Exeter, Livingston, Newport, Nursling, Peterborough, Romford, Thornaby, Yarnfield and a further centre in Northern Ireland.

Margot James, UK Minister for Digital, said:

“Openreach’s publication of clear plans for where, when and how they will be investing in new fibre networks is an important step. Long term commitments from the industry like this are very important for local communities who need this kind of guarantee on when they will be able to take advantage of the benefits that fibre can bring.

Demand for full fibre broadband is only going to increase, and through our modern Industrial Strategy we’ve worked hard to create an environment that will encourage commercial investment like this.”

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“Openreach is ambitious for the UK and is determined to build full fibre as quickly as possible to ensure the country has a reliable broadband network capable of supporting future data-hungry services and applications essential for boosting productivity and sustaining our position as a leading digital economy.

In the last year, we’ve learnt to build at high quality, and at a competitive cost. This year, we’ll prove that we can build the network on a vast scale and connect customers seamlessly.

We’re making great progress towards reaching our target of upgrading three million homes and businesses to full fibre by the end of 2020 – reaching another 13k premises per week – and these new recruits will play a crucial role in that programme. Openreach is a people business and our new apprentices will enable us to fulfil our commitments, with an ultimate ambition to deliver the best possible connectivity to everyone, everywhere, equally, across the entire country.

We’re committed to being the UK’s national provider, so on top of our recruitment plans announced today, we’ve made public the next 11 locations where we’ll start building over the next 12 months. We’ll also be publishing updated plans every three months to give people a clear idea of where we’re building.”

At this point we should remind readers that most of the FTTP currently being built by Openreach stems from their own commercial investment, although we are seeing a fair bit that also comes from existing state aid supported contracts across the UK.

As we recall the initial Fibre First programme (3 million premises) should see them build their optical fibre network to cover around 800,000 premises in Broadband Delivery UK areas (mostly rural) and new housing sites, plus to around 1.7 million premises in towns and cities (many of these will also cater for businesses).

In terms of ISP choice, BT naturally has a bunch of their own BT Ultrafast packages (G.fast and FTTP based) on sale and we recommend checking out other ISPs like Zen Internet, iDNET, AAISP, Freeola and Cerberus Networks for some rival packages on the same network. Naturally this is only available to those covered by Openreach’s FTTP and for the time being that coverage is still very limited.

Sadly neither TalkTalk, Plusnet nor Sky Broadband have formally launched FTTP packages using Openreach’s network, but as availability grows we do expect some of those providers to join. Meanwhile other network operators, such as Vodafone, may be more focused upon building their own alternative networks and time will tell whether or not they include Openreach’s ultrafast fibre.

All of this will no doubt help the Government to achieve their current target of supporting FTTP networks to cover 10 million UK premises by the end of 2022 and 15 million by the end of 2025 (here), which will of course involve input from many AltNet ISPs and not just Openreach (summary of UK full fibre deployments). We also expect a fair bit of urban overbuild from those.

The current government has also talked about delivering a “nationwide full-fibre to the premises network” by 2033. At present this is just an aspiration and is likely to require billions of fresh public investment (similar to the earlier BDUK programme).