Openreach Making Strong Progress on FTTP for New Build Homes

Openreach’s (BT) Director of Infrastructure Solutions, Matthew Kirkman, has revealed that they’re now rolling out 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP networks at a rate of 20,000 UK homes passed per week (3x quicker than last year) and 88% of the new build developments they work with are opting for it.

The operator’s “full fibre” network has so far reached 1.2 million premises (here) and that’s almost half-way to their current “Fibre First” target of 3 million premises by the end of 2020 (i.e. March 2021 financial), after which they also have an ambition to reach 10 million premises by around 2025 (provided an agreement can be reached with Ofcom / Government on the details of such a significant investment).

A big chunk of this effort stems from deployments to new build home sites. According to Matthew, around 1 million plots via 14,000 different developers have been contracted with Openreach for “fibre broadband” since February 2016 and 840,000 of those will be delivered using FTTP technology. Furthermore 400,000 of these FTTP deployments are classed as “self-install” (i.e. developer does most of the work rather than Openreach).

The details, which were revealed as part of a presentation given to the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA) seminar in Cardiff last week (here), also note that a total of 240,000 plots have been contracted over the past 12 months and 88% of those are now FTTP (11% FTTC and under 1% pure copper).

What’s particularly interesting about all this is how much the situation has changed vs copper based (ADSL / FTTC) broadband technologies over the past few years. The forecast for 2023-24 is now 99% of new sites taking FTTP.

One of the biggest reasons for this change will be that Openreach offers all new developments of 30 or more homes the ability get FTTP built for free, while those below 30 homes (between 2 to 29 properties) can also benefit from a significantly discounted install (here).

The sub-30 sites discount was only launched at the end of last year and so far 2,186 sites have registered for it, with 21.6% of related plots contracting for FTTP, 76.4% going with FTTC and just 2% looking at old fashioned pure copper line solutions. The economics for smaller developments are obviously much more challenging (developer makes the technology decision for fibre, not Openreach).

All of this appears to be roughly in keeping with the progress being seen toward full fibre across the wider new build homes market (here).