Openreach Gift FREE Service to Bristol’s Ultrafast FTTP Broadband Trial

BTOpenreach has confirmed that businesses covered by their trial of “ultrafast” (up to 1000Mbps) Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) based broadband technology in the city of Bristol (South West England) will, for a limited time, be able to get the service with both a free connection and free rental.

A few months ago BT confirmed that Bristol would be one of the first 9 areas to benefit from their expanded roll-out of FTTP broadband technology (here), which is expected to reach 2 million premises around the United Kingdom by 2020 (roughly half of these will be businesses).

At the time BT confirmed that the roll-out could take nine months and they would mostly focus on reaching areas that cannot currently benefit from existing “fibre broadband” services. Under this approach ISPs would finally be able to offer the new products from the end of December 2016.

The good news is that businesses in the Avonmouth part of Bristol, which straddles the coast and exit to the Avon river, will now benefit from both a free FTTP connection and rental between 7th October 2016 to 31st March 2017 (price details). The discount will apply to both of Openreach’s fastest trial tiers, the 500Mbps (165Mbps upload) and 1000Mbps (220Mbps upload) options.

The move is not a surprise because Openreach has already adopted a similar approach as part of their Bradford trial, which may be partly because they haven’t yet decided how much to charge for the faster tiers. Never the less it should represent a significant and attractive saving for local firms.