UPDATE2 BT Openreach Add G.fast to “Fibre Broadband” Availability Check

Openreach (BT) has confirmed to ISPreview.co.uk that their Fibre Availability Checker will tomorrow be updated to enable the inclusion of a G.fast order journey, but you shouldn’t expect to get a lot of detail. Plus the coverage of their “ultra fast” service is very limited.

The new ‘up to’ 330Mbps capable G.fast (ITU G.9700/9701) broadband technology is currently being deployed into a 138,000 premise strong pilot at 17 locations across the UK (details) and this should be ready by the end of March 2017. However the commercial roll-out, which aims to cover 10 million premises by 2020 and then “most of the UK” by 2025 (including FTTP coverage), isn’t due to begin until the last half of this year.

Unsurprisingly this means that Openreach will need to update their availability checker to include G.fast and there’s a very vague briefing about it online (here). We weren’t able to get any further details, but we have been told that everything should be live tomorrow.

Mind you the information provided to those within the G.fast pilot areas will most likely be just as limited as it is for those within reach of FTTC (VDSL2) coverage today (e.g. availability status, cabinet number, exchange name etc.). Elsewhere we don’t yet have an ETA for when the related BT Wholesale’s Availability Checker has also followed suit (see further below for examples). BTW provides some useful information on estimated performance.

UPDATE:

Here’s what it looks like.

UPDATE 2:

The BT Wholesale checker now includes speed estimates for G.fast, but so far we’ve only been able to get these up by using a specific address check. An example report can be found below.