BT Set to Promise Faster Broadband for the Final 5 Percent of the UK

Reports suggest that BT’s CEO, Gavin Patterson, will tomorrow outline a new plan for expanding the reach of faster broadband services to the final 5% of premises in the United Kingdom (most of those are in remote rural locations).

At present BT’s existing deployment alongside the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme is already helping to push superfast broadband (24Mbps+) connectivity out to 95% of premises by 2017/18, while reaching the final 5% is considered much more challenging / expensive and the Government are currently finalising a plan for that (expected in the Autumn Statement).

In the meantime it’s no secret that BT are under a lot of pressure right now, not least from rivals that want to see them being broken-up (here). As such one way for the operator to win back hearts and minds might be to make a bold commitment that would improve connectivity to the final 5%.

The Sunday Times suggests that this is exactly what Patterson intends to do tomorrow and at the same time he will also elaborate on their plans for the commercial deployment of 500Mbps capable G.fast broadband technology, which we’ve recently been covering quite a lot (here).

However it’s worth noting that the Times piece appears to conflate G.fast with the 5% announcement, perhaps incorrectly, although it is entirely conceivable that they could make use of the technology alongside Fibre-to-the-remote-Node (FTTrN) and Fibre-to-the-Distribution-Point (FTTdp) to tackle rural areas too (power supply may be a problem).

In our view it’s also unlikely that BT wouldn’t have first discussed this with BDUK, which has already touted a Satellite fix for the most remote final 1-2% (here) and has been testing a number of alternative network technologies (e.g. fixed wireless) for the other 3% or so. So would this mean a wasted effort on those altnet pilots and or more criticism of public funding being used to prop-up BT? We’ll have to wait and see.

In any case we don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility that BT could simply extend their existing FTTC / VDSL “fibre broadband” to reach 97% of the UK, although the big question would be whether or not that delivers “superfast” (24Mbps+) speeds. The Government has said before that they aspire to 100% being within reach of superfast, so they’d probably have to deliver it.

On the other hand BT might just announce its own Satellite product or some kind of 4G based solution, given their pending EE purchase.

UPDATE 22nd September 2015

The announcement is out (here).