Openreach Deploy 6,000th Electric Vehicle Under UK Fleet Transition
National UK network operator Openreach (BT) has revealed that they’ve just put their 6,000th EV (Electric Vehicle) on the road to support their broadband and phone engineers (up from 4,300 at the start of 2025), which is currently expected to reach 7,000 EVs by the end of March 2026.
The operator, which manages the second-largest commercial vehicle fleet in the UK (i.e. 23,000 vehicles), is currently aiming to upgrade the “vast majority” of their diesel-powered vans and cars to EVs by the end of March 2031 (supporting their Net Zero target for the same date).
To support the transition, Openreach have been installing EV charging points at operational sites and engineers’ homes to support convenient overnight charging. The company has also previously built a partnership with First Bus, so engineers can charge their vans at First Bus depots, taking pressure off public charging points and making life easier for those who live in flats.
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Most of the network operator’s EVs have come from Ford, Stellantis (e.g. Vauxhall), Toyota, and Renault.
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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A perfect use case. When I managed a team of field technicians in what later became Openreach a couple of decades ago no-one did more than about 40 miles a day. People would do 3 or 4 jobs a day, each several miles apart. Mostly this was down to very careful patch management – the skills and kit in each area was matched to the historic trends on the types of work seen in those places.
The only trouble is, I can’t use any fast chargers where I live. There’s always Openreach asleep charging their vans whilst earning wages.
So Openreach are increasing demand for charging infrastructure, providing the charging network operators with an incentive to upgrade their offerings.
wasting money and shit slow bringin fttp waiting still in 2025 bt excuses yet management get bonuses for what…
“Wasting money and
Shit-slow bringin
FTTP waiting still 2025.”
Sounds like Openreach has prompted an increase in haiku in your region. Surely we should appreciate them for that?
It’s all because of ESG and the fake jobs economy which is finally starting to get banned
Don’t apprecaite your swearing and bad grammar/spelling. I’ve got VM and am still awaiting any FTTP to get away from VM, like many on here. So be patient.