Openreach Adds 17 Rural Locations to N.Ireland FTTP Rollout

Openreach (BT) has today named a further 17 new “rural” towns and villages across Northern Ireland that, over the next 18 months, will benefit from a local investment of £130m (up from the prior commitment of £100m) to help expand the reach of their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network.

So far Openreach have been building their full fibre across Northern Ireland at a rate of over 3,500 premises passed per week and in April 2021 they revealed a plan to add another 100,000 premises to their coverage over the next year (here). All of this forms part of their wider £15bn investment to reach 25 million homes and businesses by December 2026 (80% of the UK), which includes 6.2 million premises in rural or semi-rural areas (here).

By comparison, today’s announcement for N.Ireland represents a further £30m boost to their existing plans between 2021 and 2022. In addition, the operator has today appointed Garret Kavanagh as Director of Openreach Northern Ireland. Garret, who’s most recent role was Senior Manager of Infrastructure Delivery, has more than 10 years’ experience in Openreach NI and replaces Mairead Meyer, who has stepped down after 5 years in the role.

Otherwise, the new locations announced today span the length and breadth of the region, from Belleek in Co. Fermanagh to Stewartstown in Co. Tyrone to Cushendun in Co. Antrim and Killinchy in Co. Down.

The 17 New Rural Towns and Villages
BELCOO
BELLEEK
COAGH
CUSHENDUN
DUNLOY
DERRYLIN
GLENARM
ISLANDMAGEE
KESH
KILLINCHY
KIRCUBBIN
LOUGHGALL
ROSLEA
SEAFORDE
SPRINGFIELD
STEWARTSTOWN
TEMPO

At present Openreach’s wider UK FTTP network covers a total of over 5.2 million premises via a build rate of c.43,000 premises per week (not to mention take-up of c.17,000 per week), which should continue to ramp-up until it hits a peak of c.75,000 premises per week (equating to about 4 million UK premises deployed a year).

Garret said:

“We’re undergoing a once in a generation upgrade of our broadband network from copper to Full Fibre. We are delighted that we will be building Ultrafast Full Fibre broadband to 17 more rural towns and villages over the next 18 months and investing a total of £130 million in Northern Ireland between 2021 and 2022.

700,000 homes and businesses will be able to access Ultrafast Full Fibre technology by March 2022, that’s 75% of properties across Northern Ireland. We’re extremely proud to be building a strong and resilient network that will meet the needs of everyone, now and for decades to come. It’s a fantastic time to step into the role of Director of Openreach Northern Ireland.”

The expansion of Openreach’s commercial build also means there will be less of a gap for the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme to fill, although it may also put additional pressure on some alternative network providers that were targeting some of the same areas.

Similarly, it will be interesting to see how much of their new commercial expansion may end up building across areas that had previously been targeted as part of the state aid supported Project Stratum contract with rival operator Fibrus, which was recently given a rollout boost of its own (here).

As usual, the deployment of FTTP broadband is not an automatic upgrade for consumers, which still need to order the service from a choice of ISPs.