BT Update – Openreach Lose 192K UK Broadband Lines as FTTP Covers 23.4M
Telecoms giant BT Group just published a short trading update to the end June 2026, which reveals that Openreach lost a total of 192,000 broadband lines to rivals over the past quarter (improved from -203k last quarter). But their “full fibre” (FTTP) coverage grew to 23.4 million premises (up from 22.92m) and EE’s 5G+ mobile coverage reached 77% of the UK population.
Just for a little context. 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 they added 514,000 FTTP broadband lines to their network coverage in the last quarter, which is sharply down on the c. 1 million premises they’ve previously been adding on a quarterly basis. But this is to be expected as the network operator is now past their roll-out peak and will be in a gradual ramp-down phase.
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The key question is how much further they will build past their December 2026 target, since the 30m figure remains an ambition and we’ve yet to see a solid build plan for going dramatically beyond 25-26m. On top of that Openreach also reported that some 574,000 customers had joined their FTTP network in the last quarter (total premises connected 9.4 million), which has pushed their take-up rate higher again to touch an impressive 40% (up from 38.27% last quarter).
Otherwise, on those broadband line losses, Openreach has previously stated that the vast majority 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. The operator still expects to lose c.800,000 lines across the coming year (down from 825,000 last year).
However, despite the challenges, BT’s bosses will probably feel confident of the operator’s direction, particularly after having succeeded in getting the stock market to better recognise the value of the fibre they now have in the ground. The group’s share price has gone from around 140p in January 2025 to 196p now, albeit wobbling a bit during the year.
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 75,000+ (i.e. some 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 usually grows faster once the roll-out pace slows). BT also holds a target of 13.0-14.5 million retail 5G mobile connections via EE.
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BT Group’s Performance Summary
➤ FTTP footprint increased to 23.4m, an increase of 514k in the quarter, on track to achieve our 25m FTTP build target by December 2026
➤ Record customer demand for Openreach FTTP with 574k net adds in the quarter; total premises connected 9.4m, bringing our market – leading take-up rate to 40%; Openreach broadband ARPU grew by 7% to £17.7, driven by higher FTTP take-up, speed mix and price increases
➤ Openreach broadband lines fell by 192k; we continue to expect losses of c. 800k in the year
➤ EE maintained its mobile leadership, winning P3’s Test Champion Award and topping the Reliability, Coverage and Performance categories; 5G+ population coverage rose to 77%, up from 73% last quarter
➤ Record retail FTTP base growth, up 1.1m year-on-year to 4.8m, comprising 4.5m Consumer connections (54% of the broadband base) and 0.3m Business connections
➤ Continued Consumer customer growth, up 1k in broadband, 13k in postpaid mobile and 9k in TV. Both our broadband and postpaid mobile churn remained stable year-on-year at 1.1% and 1.0% respectively despite competition as our fibre-first strategy continues to deliver
➤ Consumer ARPU of £40.9 in broadband, down 2% year-on-year primarily due to declines in voice; £19.7 in postpaid mobile, up 2% year-on-year; Consumer fixed and mobile convergence increased to 26.8% from 26.6% last quarter and 25.5% last year; EE One Up rewards programme launched
➤ Business service revenue stabilising, with strong sales order growth including new connectivity contracts signed with Scottish Water and Royal Mail
➤ International JV with Verizon announced combining our operations to create a stronger scaled global connectivity business and marking a significant milestone in delivering BT Group’s UK-focused strategy
➤ Cost transformation delivered efficiencies across all units, with year-on-year reductions in network energy usage of 8%, total labour resource excluding International of 8% to 94k and in Openreach repair volumes of 21%
➤ BT Group NPS increased to 30.7, up 3.6pts year-on-year, rebased for the exclusion of International
➤ Revenue £4.3bn, flat year-on-year. Adjusted UK service revenue £3.8bn down 1%, as growth in broadband and Corporate and Public Sector in Business and customer base growth in Consumer were offset by declines in voice
➤ Adjusted EBITDA £2.0bn, down 1% year-on-year and broadly flat excluding the impact of prior year one-offs, with lower broadband and voice margins offsetting strong cost transformation
➤ Reported profit before tax of £505m, down 4% driven by higher finance costs offset by lower restructuring costs
BT’s CEO, Allison Kirkby, said:
“BT has made a solid start to the year. We are connecting more customers to our next-generation networks, and are increasingly the choice for mission-critical solutions, as we connect and protect the country and accelerate our transformation.
Across Openreach and Consumer we achieved record new full fibre connections and take-up, resulting in fibre contributing to more than half of our broadband revenues for the first time. By investing in all our brands, and the services they offer, we’re continuing to grow our Consumer customer base. In Business, service revenue is stabilising, with excellent sales order growth from major customers. In this final year of the legacy landline network, our service revenue, excluding voice, grew in the quarter.
We expanded 5G+ further to now reach 77% of the UK population and our full fibre build is on track to reach 25 million premises by the end of December. Internationally, our proposed joint venture with Verizon will create a scaled global connectivity platform and allow us to focus on our transformation in the UK.
No-one is upgrading and investing in the country’s digital backbone at the scale and pace that BT is. We remain on track to deliver our targets, including cash flow of c£2.0bn this year and c£3.0bn by the end of the decade – as we create a better BT, for all of us.”
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. 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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They were at 22.7m at the end of April so they are currently running at 350k a month. If they carry on at the same rate they will be closer to 26m by the end of the year. Would be interesting to know how much of the £15bn budget they’ve spent so far.
This seems odd. They reported they had got to 21.4 million premises at the end of December (https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/02/bt-results-openreach-lose-210k-uk-broadband-lines-as-fttp-cover-hits-21-4m.html) and at the end of June they had got 23.4 million premises so they have added 2 million in the last six months so if they only added 514,000 in the last quarter they must have done exceptionally well in the first 3 months of the year.
Openreach has been running a heavily incentivized copper to fibre conversion campaign which may account for a lot of the FTTP take-up in the first part of this year, with the change usually being free to customers (often with modest speed increase from VDSL speeds to 100mbs unless the ISP has capped at a lower level).
That’s not a net change in customers, just less copper and more fibre; strategically cost positive in the long term, in some cases this will help enable exchange closure.
Also if they’re only going to do 1/2 million for the next 2 quarters they’ll miss their target of by 600k.
Tracking I do on thinkbroadband will differ slightly in time frame but yes first quarter of the year was exceptional
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/exclusive-april-2026-update-on-openreach-full-fibre-roll-out
Well they need to ramp up again for the final 6 months of this year or they will miss their target.
Also Richard Tang of Zen reported them being at 22.7 million at the end of April here:-https://youtu.be/ZaAsoUrThrA?t=887 so that would imply 700k in May & June alone.
Mark – I’ve just been back through the news archive for April & May and it doesn’t appear BT/OR gave an update for the January to March ’26 build like they usually do. Have I missed it or did they not give an update for that quarter?
Openreach been ramping up roll out as the end of 2026 is looming not far away and they have numbers to meet as this year is a major milestone in fibre rollout. Watching bidb.uk in a number of areas and some areas have been dotted with Openreach activity. Virgin also been busy in some areas like Peterborough for example, upgrading their HFC network inftatructure to full fibre whilst non-existant in other areas (perhaps because of Netomnia outcome and awaiting to buy other Altnets). VMs milestone isn’t until 2028 though as that was their date for completely upgrading HFC network to full fibre (as in, its implemented but customers not all switched over).
They just lost me as well. Simply, price and upload speeds. Now I paying twice less for twice faster broadband and have symmetric speed.
May come back when, at least upload speed will be better.
Losing customers like you is part of Openreach’s plan. Openreach is highly regulated, but if they let altnets take (say) 10-20% of market share then they have a strong case for lower regulation in future.
Most altnets only exist because Openreach is forced to allow them to use their ducts and poles at a discount price.
They’d probably lose me if I had an alternative. Around here it’s all alt-nets and Virgin, except for the road I live on. Openreach have started installing – but of course they are overbuilding the alt-nets first. They seem to have only recently woken up to the fact that they’ve let other providers grab the most lucrative areas first.
BT also made £505 million profit before tax. The altnets can only dream of that.
The ALTNETS do not have decades of customers who have lucrative leased lines! They are far smaller than BT/Openreach’s established business that was built upon tax payer infrastructure (poles, chambers, exchanges etc) from GPO days. They should have a lot more profit, so no surprise.
You’re missing the point. BT have made a profit *after* paying the interest on the debt from rolling out FTTP. Nobody made the altnets rack up huge debt by building at a rate that outstripped income from customer take-up.
To add – the altnets have been given access to those ducts and poles at inordinately low prices, including infrastructure that did not exist until after privatisation. Openreach and to a lesser extent BT’s retail arms are also subject to price controls so that they can’t undercut them.
How many more unfair advantages do the altnets need to be given? Especially for the larger altnets who are funded by banks and global telcos that are far bigger and wealthier than the BT Group. It’s not exactly the supermarkets vs the corner store or the local butcher anymore.
How is this a credible, competitive industry when they are so reliant on their competitor having its hands tied behind its back and they *still* can’t make it work?
BT Ivor: Then Openreach should innovate, offer XGS-PON, promote no-incontract prices increases for their EE adn BT ISP brands, promote recontracting customers get new customer offer pricing and watch customers join up. Simples! Stop flogging legacy GPON, in contract prices rises and getting stuffed for higher pricing than new customers. PIA is not offered cheap – BT get a good premium off of it. If the Bt figures are so wonderful why do you call for being allowed to price cut for a while to kill competition off then? Customers are walking off to other providers because of things highlighted above, it’s slow, but it always is at girst as takes time for word to get around there is an alternative and in a number of cases, good.
Winston: Did not miss the point. BT are well established company over many decades that did not have to pay for every piece of infrastructure from scratch like an ALTNET does and why they have debt. They got a significant discount from the GPO which tax payer owned rather than have to create everything from scratch. They also have other business services that prop them up like expensive, lucrative leased lines/point to point.
Respectable results overall.
Worth noting that there will be another dimension to the losses. The PSTN closure might be triggering ceases of lines that weren’t being used or are no longer needed, but someone’s been paying a bill for them all this time.
The fact that BT’s retail businesses have done well suggests that much of the altnet losses would be driven by “involuntary” migrations i.e. OR’s other customers moving their end users from ADSL or FTTC over to an altnet’s FTTP, where the end user has no real choice in how it is provided and the ISP goes with the cheapest wholesale option available.
But still, 192,000 new reasons for deregulation and real competition to begin.
Ahoy BT Ivor 🙂
Isn’t this the 3rd news story of churn to other network providers in space of a year, maybe a little more?
And as for “the cheapest option”; didn’t BT/Openreach go for the cheapest tech using legacy GPON which is still the default install as of 23/07/2026? Those XGS-PON trials to a full roll out seem to be languishing behind anyone else, and will for years.
No doubt on the roll-out numbers though, it’s clearly the highest roll-out schedule of anyone else. Just a shame it took competition to gee them into action as it should have started its GPON rollout in earnst circa 2012. With out the Altnets we would have been stuck with a GFAST roll out at most.
All for competition on price ONCE Openreach have upgraded to XGS-PON so public are not at long term detriment of just asymmetric provider (Openreach) + Vermin Media, the old duopoly.
@Fanny BT Consumer reported churn at 1.1% in broadband and 1% in mobile. That is an outstanding figure.
For this ONE news article, but lets not let the previous articles about churn get in the way of spin 🙂 There has been no increase reported between those news stories. Mobile is expensive under EE so that’s mainly on pricing, not because the service is bad or the tech is worse than competitors, because they are usually the best (along with some EE based MVNOs).
BT should be required to notify their customers that alternative providers are available, in order to speed up the migration away from Openreach. There is precedent for this with other monopolists such as the ‘browser choice’ notification that used to be required on Microsoft Windows. Although, to be fair, in that case that market has swung from one monopolist to another which is not a great outcome either.
They blitzed our town earlier in the year in about 4 weeks.
80% on our street on it within a few weeks. Probably half switched from Virgin, the other half (with no access to Virgin) from legacy copper. EE contributing £300 to cancellation fees pushed that along quickly.
Steady results as BT Group plods on to the promised land.
BT Consumer results are particularly pleasing with 6 consecutive quarters of increasing customer numbers combined with Openreach stand-out take up figures. This leaves them well placed as Altnets are going to be forced to increase prices or go bust. Or both.
or the third option:
Companies that wish to buy them up to wipe out any competition using disguised reasons – thinking of Netomnia which has a large overlap with VM.