Openreach Unveil 36 New UK Areas for FTTP Ultrafast Broadband

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today announced that their multi-billion pound “Fibre First” rollout of Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology will – over the next 12 months – be reaching parts of an additional 36 new locations across the UK (total now 74).

The development forms part of the operator’s on-going work to cover 4 million premises (homes and businesses) with “full fibre” FTTP across the United Kingdom by March 2021, which could be extended to 15 million by around 2025 and they may even go beyond that if the conditions are right (e.g. easier wayleave agreements, extension to the business rates holiday etc.).

So far around 1.5 million premises have already been reached and their rollout is continuing to ramp-up (currently passing 20,000 homes and businesses every week). However we should caveat that Openreach doesn’t usually cover 100% of every area they list and unfortunately they haven’t said how many premises will benefit in each location.

In this latest phase Openreach has included the likes of Newcastle, Doncaster, Chelmsford and St Albans, whilst four new locations in Scotland (Kilmarnock in East Ayrshire and Bathgate, Broxburn and Whitburn in West Lothian) have also been prioritised following the Scottish Government’s decision to extend business rates relief on new fibre for a 10 year period (here); a not so subtle hint that they want the UK Government to follow suit.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“We’re pressing ahead with our investment and Openreach engineers are now building in communities all over the country, keeping us on track to deliver against the bigger ambitions we set out in May.

The Government wants to see a nationwide full fibre network and we’re keen to lead the way in helping them achieve that. We know that if it’s going to happen, Openreach will need to be at the front doing the heavy lifting, so we’re working hard to build a commercially viable plan.

One headwind to investment which affects all full fibre builders is business rates, and we’ve been encouraged by the Scottish Government’s move to extend rates relief north of the border. I’m convinced that prioritising investment in faster, more reliable and future proof broadband networks will prove to be a no-regrets decision for future generations.”

Paul Wheelhouse, Connectivity Minister for the Scottish Government, said:

“We listened to industry and provided 10 years rates relief, five years more than the UK Government, with the aim of encouraging new investment in Scotland’s fibre infrastructure network. I am pleased to see that decision yielding early results with this announcement by Openreach.”

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

At present the top fastest consumer (residential) focused FTTP tier on their network is a 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) service, although Openreach has announced a forthcoming price reduction on full fibre packages and this included mention of two new 500Mbps and 1Gbps consumer tiers that are due for future launch (here).

All of this will no doubt help the Government to achieve their current target of supporting FTTP networks to cover the whole of the United Kingdom, although we still have significant doubts about the viability of Boris Johnson’s new 2025 target vs the original 2033 ambition. This will of course involve input from many alternative network ISPs and not just Openreach (summary of UK full fibre deployments).

As usual you can check out the fibre first roll-out page on their website, which includes a more detailed exchange level roll-out plan for each of the announced locations. The full list of locations announced so far is as follows.