BT’s “Fibre Broadband” Network Reaches 86 Percent of UK Premises

Openreach, which maintains and manages access to BT’s national UK telecoms network, has today confirmed that their ‘up to’ 40-80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL) dominated “fibre broadband” network is now within reach of 25 million homes and businesses (86%+ UK coverage).

At this point it’s worth reminding readers that Openreach’s first 19 million premises (c.66% of the United Kingdom) were delivered as part of BT’s separate £2.5bn commercial roll-out by 2014 and the progress since then has been primarily supported by the Government’s state aid gobbling Broadband Delivery UK project (note: the commercial roll-out is on-going, but at a slower pace).

The operator has also made their ultrafast 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network available to over 200,000+ UK premises and recent reports have suggested that we could see a much greater focus on pure fibre optic FTTP connections going forward (here and here), although we’ve yet to be told of any solid targets.

Obviously the above effort is a large part of the reason why the Government were last month able to confirm that 90% of UK premises had been put within reach of a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network (here), which also includes coverage from other operators like Virgin Media and Gigaclear etc.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“The UK is making great progress with fibre broadband. Availability and take up are well ahead of most European countries and I’d like to thank the thousands of Openreach engineers who have worked so tirelessly to make this happen.

The job isn’t finished however and we are working hard to get coverage to 95 per cent and above. We are also exploring how we can improve speeds for the million or so premises in the final few per cent of the country.

Our approach has delivered affordable superfast services to the vast majority of the country in the fastest possible time. We want to build upon that by making ultrafast broadband available to most of the UK. We will do this using a mix of G.fast technology and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), with the latter focused mainly on new developments and small businesses in high streets and business parks.”

As for the future, Openreach has made no secret of the fact that their primary focus will be on rolling out the next generation of hybrid-fibre broadband technology called G.fast. They intend to begin the commercial roll-out of G.fast next summer 2017 (here), which will follow an expanded pilot this summer with 25,000 premises in Cambridgeshire and Kent.

The operator has pledged to make the new G.fast service available to 10 million premises by 2020, with “most of the UK” likely to be done by 2025 (we’d guess that “most” will equate to around 60% UK coverage). Initially G.fast will only offer top download speeds of ‘up to’ 300Mbps (50Mbps upload), before later increasing to 500Mbps. FTTP will also get a speed boost to 1Gbps, albeit mostly for business customers.

However one of the key questions for BT’s G.fast technology is what tolerance for distance the operator will opt to maintain. Lines longer than 350 metres (copper run) are likely to deliver significantly slower speeds than the headline rate and we still don’t know if BT will stick to a specific limit or relax their expectations in order to reach more people, albeit at slower speeds.