BT Results – Openreach Lose 210k UK Broadband Lines as FTTP Cover Hits 21.4M
Telecoms giant BT Group just published a short trading update to the end December 2025 (Q3 FY26), which reveals that Openreach lost a total of 210,000 broadband lines to rivals over the past quarter (down from 242k in Sept 2025). But their “full fibre” (FTTP) coverage grew to 21.4 million premises (up from 20.3m) and take-up increased to 38% (up from 37.66%).
Firstly, our usual reminder that the BT Group now only publishes a short trading update for Q1 and Q3, thus we only get a very limited summary this time around – the full half-yearly reports come in Q2 and Q4. As such, we’ve opted to do a similarly brief update on the key details below.
In terms of the other headline changes, Openreach noted that some 5.9 million of the premises they’d covered with FTTP were in rural areas and that their full fibre network had now connected a total of 8.2 million premises. Suffice to say that their level of take-up in such a competitive market is still fairly strong and continuing to grow. BT’s own retail FTTP customer base also grew 32% year-on-year to 4.2m.
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Otherwise, on those broadband line losses, Openreach has previously stated that around 80% of those usually come from areas where they haven’t yet deployed their new FTTP network (e.g. areas with older ADSL, FTTC broadband or phone-only lines). This underlines the importance of Openreach’s rapid roll-out, but it also highlights the benefits of a first-mover advantage for rival networks in targeting such areas. Openreach said they now expect full year broadband line losses of c.850k for the year, which is said to be “better than our previous estimate“.
However, despite the challenges, BT’s CEO can probably still feel reasonably confident of the operator’s direction, particularly after having somewhat succeeded in getting the stock market to better recognise the value of the fibre they now have in the ground (here and here). The group’s share price has gone from around 140p in January 2025 to around 202p this morning, but this is down from the c.220p peak they saw in July 2025.
As usual, it’s worth contrasting the latest results against BT’s future targets for 2030, which among other things have predicted that their total labour force would shrink to between 75,000 and 90,000 (i.e. many of the engineers they have today won’t be needed post-2030) and FTTP coverage would grow to between 25-30 million premises, while delivering take-up of around 40-55% (this will grow faster once the roll-out pace slows).
BT also holds a target of 13.0-14.5 million retail 5G mobile connections via EE and today’s update reports that this base has already reached 14.3m (up 10% year-on-year), while coverage of their 5G+ (5G Standalone) network reached 69% of the UK’s population.
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BT Group’s Dec 2025 Performance Summary
• More than 1m premises passed with FTTP for an eighth consecutive quarter, continuing the fastest build any company has achieved in Europe; FTTP footprint at 21.4m premises, of which 5.9m in rural locations; on track to achieve up to 5m this fiscal year and reach 25m by December 2026
• Record customer demand for Openreach FTTP with net adds of 571k, up 21% year-on-year; total premises connected 8.2m, increasing our market-leading take up rate to over 38%; Openreach broadband ARPU grew 4% to £16.8, driven by higher FTTP take-up, speed mix and price increases
• Openreach broadband lines fell 210k, down quarter-on-quarter and at a similar rate to last year; we now expect full year losses at c.850k for the year, better than our previous estimate
• Retail FTTP base grew 32% year-on-year to 4.2m, of which Consumer 3.9m and Business 0.3m
• UK’s best mobile network for a record 11th consecutive year as awarded by Umlaut Connect, extending EE’s lead over the second placed network; Opensignal placed EE first in 11 of 15 categories in its January report and yesterday RootMetrics named EE the UK’s best network for the 25th time; 5G base reached 14.3m, up 10% year-on-year; 5G+ coverage at 69%
• All Consumer customer bases grew for a fourth consecutive quarter in broadband, up 8k, a third consecutive quarter in postpaid mobile, up 55k, and a sixth consecutive quarter in TV, up 22k
• Consumer service revenue was flat year-on-year and remains on track for growth in H2; Consumer broadband ARPU was down 1% year-on-year to £41.8 and postpaid mobile ARPU was down 1% to £19.2; Consumer fixed and mobile convergence grew to 26.2% from 25.9% last quarter
• Business continues to make progress on its transformation; Q3 year-on-year performance was impacted by contract milestones, mainly in the financial and public sectors and wholesale, as well as the phasing of costs across quarters
• All five targeted disposals in International are now complete with the last, BT Radianz, closing on 1 February; disposals reduced International revenue in the quarter by £45m
• Cost transformation delivered efficiencies across all units, offsetting higher employer costs of National Living Wage and National Insurance; the year to date energy usage in our networks was down 6%, total labour resource was down 7% to 108k and Openreach repair volumes were down 18%
• Record BT Group NPS of 31.4, up 2.1pts year-on-year, demonstrating further improving customer experience
On track to achieve full year guidance:
• Q3 reported and adjusted revenue1 £5.0bn, down 4% year-on-year due to service revenue declines, lower equipment revenue, primarily handset trading, in Consumer and Business and the impact of divestments; Q3 adjusted UK service revenue1 £3.8bn, down 2%, due to the ongoing drag from legacy voice of over one percentage point as well as the phasing of trading in the prior year
• Q3 adjusted EBITDA1 £2.1bn, down 1% and broadly flat excluding the impact of prior year one-off other operating income, with lower revenue offset by continued strong cost transformation
• Q3 reported profit before tax of £183m, down £244m, driven by a £214m share of losses from the Sports JV
• We remain on track for our financial outlook and guidance metrics, including our cash flow inflection to c.£2.0bn next year, and to c.£3.0bn by the end of the decade
BT’s CEO, Allison Kirkby, said:
“BT continues to deliver on its strategy – building and connecting the UK to the best next-generation networks at record pace, while accelerating our transformation. Our network leadership strengthened further in the quarter, with full fibre broadband now reaching more than 21 million homes and businesses, and our 5G+ network accessible to 69% of the population. Openreach achieved record full fibre connections and our Consumer division again added customers in broadband, mobile and TV, as we make the most of all our brilliant brands – EE, BT and Plusnet.
Customer satisfaction reached an all-time high this quarter, and with our transformation building momentum, we are delivering ahead of plan. We remain on track for our financial outlook and guidance metrics for this year, our cash flow inflection to c.£2.0bn next year, and to c.£3.0bn by the end of the decade.”
At the end of the day, there’s still a long way to go, and many uncertainties remain about how today’s market will evolve over the next few years, particularly with respect to consolidation and Ofcom’s looming Telecoms Access Review 2026 (TAR). But the relative fibre build stagnation among many altnets and Virgin Media’s (O2) nexfibre slowdown does perhaps give the BT Group a bit more of an edge than they’ve had for a while, but they’ll need to keep reducing those line losses to rivals.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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An ever stronger case for Openreach to seek some form of deregulation and for proper, two way competition to flourish.
Altnet fans will claim it’s the alleged quality of the competition’s networks that is causing churn; it is of course purely down to wholesale pricing where Openreach’s hands are tied. (plus there’s the need for Openreach to make these pesky things called “profits” that no other operator has managed yet)
Good to see that where the BT Group has more freedom to operate its business, they’re doing pretty well.
I’ll have to see how my shares are doing…!
Releasing symmetrical speeds sooner will surely help OR
The BT Group are wise enough to be playing the long game. They can see what’s going on with the Alts.
@JiddishPickle42, what don’t help is the constant price rises when in contract and the long contracts that seems to be the norm for providers using the Openreach network.
BTIvor will say it is because of the shackles the government have on Openreach, I say bull, it is greed, companies want to lock people into a 24-month contract they can’t get out of and still increase prices in that contract.
It was not the symmetrical speeds that got me to move to as alt net and I expect many people don’t really care.
It was price and a 12-month contract, granted getting off the Openreaxch network was also a thing, but the main thing was the price and 12 month contract.
Unless the altnet I am with does something to annoy me or really pee me off, I will be staying with them, as long as they keep going, and I stay where I am house wise. If I did have to change to a openreach based ISP, I would certainly look at onestream, they have 12 month contracts, sadly prices still in crease in those contracts, but the prices are good.
Ad – Vodafone, Sky, TalkTalk will lock you into a 24 month contract regardless of whether they put you on Openreach or an altnet. OR does not lock its CPs into 24 month contracts. So this argument is not valid.
The customer doesn’t get a choice unless they are going with an altnet exclusive ISP or one of the few enthusiast brands (A&A, Aquiss, IDnet, etc) that give their customers a list of options. The big boys will automatically prefer the cheapest (to them) operator that is in your area.
I don’t agree with BT shareholders like Ivor. The answer is not to cripple competition by buying it (VM) or price war. BT could actually innovate and get symmetric turned on with XGS-PON (BT fans on here saying it’s so easy for BT as equipment is now dual mode, and ONT just sent out for swap out), without dicing the upload into multiple tiers of expensive offerings.
They could simply wipe out competition by being more innovative, but yet again, dragging their heels blaming everyone else. Whoever makes this crass strategy choices needs to be fired and made example of. Bad strategy choice made since ADSL and FTTC days and still haunt this company. They learn nothing from previous mistakes of penny pinching.
If consolidation happens and VM doesn’t get Netomnia (lets pray), then once BT’s FTTP roll out ends and they still languish on inferior GPON product that is asymmetric, things will get fruity with customer losses as we have already seen over a few reporting periods. New FTTP roll out could not cover as roll out would have largely stopped.
You would expect EE mobile (and O2) to grow simply due to merger of Vodafone & Three. I would say that it is probably unlikely that Vodafone Three would hold on to the entire customer base of the seperate companies.
Plenty of Three customers waiting contracts out and have no intention of being a continuing customer under Voda. Too many customers been burnt if they have been with them before. The real churn will start though, when Voda don’t have the two year pricing barrier under the deal and then start ramping up prices 🙂
Unfortunately Openreach in my opinion have underserved rural communities for some time, promising FTTP but then not actually delivering.
They seem to have spent too long on FTTC in rural locations and frankly alt-nets have planned, installed and delivered FTTP long before Openreach have even planned some locations which is frankly slightly embarrassing for the infrastructure leader.
This is not to say that alt-nets don’t have their drawbacks and I do have concerns that the amount of customers they take on often rapidly puts pressure on capacity in their core networks, their peering/transit arrangements and the workmanship in some areas can be a bit sloppy – in some cases even unfinished (Gigaclear).
There are a lot of alt-nets who do care and they are providing a service that is much more stable due to the very nature of GPON. Unfortunately people just aren’t prepared to pay for a weak service with high jitter and frequent re-syncs, that is often the case with Openreach DSL in rural communities.
Openreach also need to re-evaluate their asymmetric download/upload balance with their top upload speed being woefully below most alt-nets. Some will say this could be because the gap is closing between leased line performance and FTTP – for small businesses maybe, but they should still be proud of their ethernet service which is still unrivalled compared to anything else.
I honestly welcome Openreach FTTP into rural communities as I think it introduces competition where Alt-nets who are often the sole provider of FTTP in an area, can name their price.
This said, I am worried how Openreach intends to win rural customers back when they roll out FTTP to alt-nets areas? As I said previously the very nature of FTTP means a more stable experience and with people’s previous experience of Openreach being jittery DSL, will they be hesitant to switch back to Openreach if that is their last memory of them?
I suspect that Openreach has a lot more “rural” FTTP out there than you seem to think. Certainly more than any individual operator and likely more than all of them combined. Remember that the altnets have concentrated most of their commercially funded activity to overbuilding each other, Openreach and Virgin in (sub)urban areas, except where they’ve received gov subsidies.
I would also question the idea that VDSL is automatically “jittery”. Poorly performing lines yes, but it is not true that FTTP always has lower latency or jitter than any given FTTC line.
Regards planning – my rural ancestral home has an altnet duct right outside it and has done for around a year now. The (gov subsidised) altnet that owns it claims they still have no plans to serve that area even though they’ve had their sales people out already. Openreach FTTP has been available for over a decade elsewhere in the same village, and it seems all but certain that they’ll fill in these FTTC gaps soon.
Openreach is by far the biggest rural FTTP provider reporting 5.9Million premises passed in rural areas in these results. That is nigh on ten times that of specialist rural player Gigaclear.
Has it occurred to you that Openreach contracted sufficient GPON kit to fulfill their 25 million FTTP passed by end of 2026 target. This is probably the reason why they are actually delivering on that at a reasonable cost, unlike the altnet ‘aspirations’.
Have to agree with BT’s shareholder, Ivor on this one. BT have far more rural FTTP connectivity than the ALTNETS.
The ALTNETS are all about price point per house which is usually low. BARN were an exception as was mostly rural based but had a different model where community was involved for digging in fields etc.
As much as I support Netomnia, they failed miserably to do my (non-rural) address, in spite of post delivered letter promising they were doing work and address was in scope, and their post code checkers saying UNTIL TODAY that work will be underway soon. There is no direct buried cables and their netomnia chamber is on the main road nearby. The next road has it within a light stone’s throw. What stopped them is unknown. There are easy workaround for getting fibre into my road like 2 extra poles but that is *slight* additional cost.
So you are more likely to be covered by BT Openreach for FTTP when rural than an ALTNET as a general rule (exceptions apple as always). It just a shame it’s still GPON and asymmetric….
Good stuff from BT.
Particularly pleasing to see FTTP takeup rates still increasing.
Consumer increasing customer numbers despite Openreach line losses is more good news. Makes me think once Ofcom’s handcuffs are loosened winning back Sky from comatose CityFibre will be a top target.
Assuming an even distribution only about 15% of Sky customers are likely to be in CityFibre areas anyway and the chance of CF increasing their footprint by buying Netomnia seems to be off the table now the vast majority of Sky customers are going to be staying on Openreach anyway for the forseeable future.
15% of Sky broadband customer numbers is not be sniffed at and is about the same number as CityFibre’s entire customer base.
If Openreach could win Sky back, it would help with line loss figures and could be fatal to CityFibre.
There is PIA to think of which Openreach is getting rent from, a lot of Altnets use this, would be interesting to see areas where they show drop off’s in connections vs PIA rents, I would say Openreach is still making enough for it to balance out and its the ISP’s that are loosing out on non wholesale altnets.
There is sufficient evidence here todemonstrate that Ofcom’s regulation of BT is excessive and that it must be unwound to enablea competative environment.
I suspect that there will be pressure brought to Ofcom via the Foreign Office if the regulations are not cutback in the near future.
Back in 2019 BT declined to fix my flakey copper line because FTTP was coming “Soon”. Everytime it rained, the line dropped. An underground cable was shot with no good pairs. BT finally deployed FTTP last year. In the meantime an altnet appeared and I took service. I live in a London borough with a decent level of population density.
I cannot see any reason why I would buy service from an ISP using OR. BT have been lazy and entitled. They are paying the price now.