BT Wholesale FINALLY make 1.8Gbps FTTP broadband available to UK ISPs
After two years of waiting since Openreach first made their new consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband tiers – 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps – available across the UK market (here). BT’s own wholesale division has finally now launched related products on their platform for retail UK ISP partners to sell on to customers.
The impact of this change is likely to be limited as many ISPs are already harnessing networks from other wholesale suppliers that can support the new speed tiers, or even by building their own platforms independent of BTWholesale (e.g. EE, Zen Internet etc.). Suffice to say that quite a few Openreach based ISPs have already made retail packages available via the new tiers using those alternative approaches.
Nevertheless, there are still some retail providers that have opted to wait for BTW to play their slow game of industry catch-up, which in practice often leaves them stuck offering top speeds of no more than 1Gbps (frequently advertised as c.900Mbps – average speeds as at peak time).
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Earlier this year BTW informed ISPreview that the reason it was taking such a long time to introduce the “new” speed tiers is because their “focus has been [on] supporting partners and their customers through the UK’s transition to All-IP” (i.e. switching off and migrating users away from the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by 31st Jan 2027). But it’s also true that there have always been extra costs and network upgrades required to facilitate support for faster tiers too, which can take a bit of time to deploy.
The good news, as first spotted by ISPreview reader John and later via our forum, is that BT Wholesale’s Broadband Checker service has just been updated to increase the maximum download speed on their FTTP listing up to 1800Mbps. This is usually a firm indication that BTW now support the new tiers and sure enough they’ve added both 1.2Gbps (usually advertised as 1Gbps) and 1.8Gbps (advertised as 1.6Gbps) to their price list – available from today (8th November 2026).
BTW are currently charging a monthly rental to ISPs of £49.66 excluding VAT for 1.2Gbps and £51.66 for 1.8Gbps, so obviously you can expect the retail prices to be higher than that once ISPs have added all of the usual extra service costs, tax and a profit margin to the final figure etc.
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Meanwhile, Openreach are already in the process of expanding their pilot for a new range of symmetric capable FTTP (XGS-PON) broadband speeds up to 8.5Gbps (only EE currently offers this as a commercial package), and we can only hope that BTW won’t take another 2-3 years to adapt to that too it exits the pilot-phase – expected sometime in 2027.
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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Although my exchange has yet to be upgraded looking at the BT Wholesale Broadband Availability tool I note that the Fttp on demand downstream line rate has been quietly upgraded from 300 mbps to 1000 mbps.
Totally awesome.
bt.com still only offers up to 900.lol they are even behind themselves.
BT customers can regrade to EE 1.6gbps
I have been able to get 1.6 from lots of places for those 2 years – so it’s not my exchange.
BT.com only offering up to 900 – my checker shows the same as the screenshot – 1800 down and 220 up.
“£49.66 excluding VAT for 1.2Gbps” – they’re not going to get any ISP customers at that price! That’s £59.59 *before* you add any of the ISP’s own costs – transit, billing, helpdesk, router etc.
Meanwhile, even Olilo is selling this speed to end-users at £49 per month, and Aquiss at £57 (with first 3 months half price), both on 12-month contracts.
They get them via Zen who probably can do much cheaper prices than Openreach
Olilo don’t – they use their own backhaul providers. I think anyway
I want to see AAISP do it – they have been stuck at 1Gbps for what 10 years now?
A&A have been selling 2.5G over CityFibre for a while.
I believe A&A have been dependant on this. https://www.aa.net.uk/etc/news/faster-fttp-from-bt-still-unavailable/
I’m a little surprised that A&A don’t have a second backhaul provider for Openreach FTTP. I expected better of them. Perhaps not TalkTalk / PXC given the circumstances, but still…
Toooo expensiveee!!! other altnets ie, youfibre doing 1G for half price. Another dinosaur move by good old bt.
If only they would upgrade the exchange.
From what I understand these high rental prices exist because Openreach have a floor they can’t go below due to laws or Ofcom restrictons around market competitivity.
Don’t confuse BT Wholesale and Openreach…
‘up to 220Mbps’ for upload? God its trully pathetic.
And as I keep saying, over and over again….
Most people don’t need symmetric/high uploads.
They are consumers
@ lion
and yet openreach have 10 million customers on full fibre out of around 24 million premises that can
Higher takeup and more customers than any other network.
The market disagrees with your assessment.
How many customers need gigabit upload speeds?
To be fair 900mbps isnt slow and its likely not affecting sales by anything more than a few %.
Hopefully plusnet will offer faster speeds, soon!
Plusnet will never offer this – far too expensive for them plus their router hub 2 do not support 1.6Gbps or 1.2Gbps as it was limit up to 1Gbps.
BT’s router does not – but EE’s does – a router change is a simple affair. But I agree they will be doing all they can to fold existing customers into EE. Plusnet has been a dying duck since 2018 – and I worked there for 25 years so I’ve seen it all before BT came along and then impact afterwards. A lot of PN staff (mainly managers and team leaders too) were moved into BT Corporate roles.
So even for 1.2Gbps, I’d need an ONT upgrade. Are Openreach still installing 1Gbps ONTs by default (mine was installed in Sept 2025), or are they now on 2.5Gbps units?
i went for 150mb with BT in april 2026 and they ( mj quinn ) installed a 2.5gb ont
I was put in a 2.5Gbps ONT 3 years ago. I know it’s correct as I have run 1.8Gbps on it in the past without issues