Openreach FTTP Broadband Build in Bristol Hits 80,000 Premises

Openreach (BT) has announced that, after 12 months of building, their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the UK city of Bristol has now extended its coverage to 80,000 local premises (40% of the city) and rising. Sadly they don’t say how much further they intend to go.

So far the new network has already been built across big parts of Bedminster, Bishopsworth, North Bristol, West Bristol, Easton, Filton and Whitchurch. In the “coming months“, work will also reach Fishponds and Redcliffe.

The work forms part of their on-going Fibre First strategy, which currently aims to cover 4 million premises (homes and businesses) by March 2021 and then there’s an ambition for 15 million by around 2025 (possibly costing upwards of £5bn). At present they’ve already built to cover a total of 1.8 million premises (here) and are passing a further c.23,000 UK homes and businesses every week.

Sadly Openreach doesn’t say how much they’re investing into the deployment in Bristol, although we know that most of their urban builds thus far have been done at the lower end of their £300 – £400 per premises passed cost range. Taking the middle value, we’d say 80,000 would have cost them a total of around £28m.

James Tappenden, Director of Openreach Fibre First, said:

“Recent research shows that connecting everyone in Bristol and in the South West to ‘full fibre’ broadband would create a £4.3 billion boost to the region’s economy, by unlocking smarter ways of working, better public services and greater opportunities for the next-generation of home-grown businesses.

Our new network will also help to support Bristol’s Smart City Strategy and its pillar of achieving ‘world class connectivity’, as well as underpinning the council’s One City Vision of Connectivity – which includes the aim of removing the obstacles and barriers to people connecting.”

As you’d expect Openreach does have competition in the local market where their chief competitor is Virgin Media, which has a soon-to-be 1Gbps capable cable and full fibre network that stretches across the majority of Bristol. Smaller ISPs, such as Spectrum Internet, have also built a little FTTP of their own (here) and Cityfibre’s tentative future roll-out strategy still lists Bristol as a target city for their own FTTH with Vodafone UK (albeit not yet confirmed on their current rollout).