Berkeley Group UK Home Builders Say Ultrafast Broadband is a “Must Have”

Property developer firm the Berkeley Group, which has a partnership to roll-out Openreach’s (BT) 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) technology at new build sites, has said that “ultrafast broadband” is now “almost as important to new home buyers as running water and electricity.”

The comments are unsurprising given that the Berkeley Group has this year adopted “full fibre” across almost every development it’s building and they aim to provide it for all future homes, which is a policy decision that we first reported on all the way back in 2014 (here). Berkeley was one of the first developers to do this and many others didn’t follow until last year (after the Government and EU put pressure on them).

We suspect that ultrafast broadband will never become more important than electricity or water, at least not in the eyes of anybody with common sense (you need water to live and broadband is kind of useless without electricity), but it’s good to see that progress is being made and “full fibre” is finally achieving greater acceptance.

Rob Perrins, Berkeley’s CEO, said:

“For new home buyers, high-speed broadband has almost become a given now – it is like the power steering on a car – no one asks whether the car they’re buying has it anymore.

If we weren’t able to offer fibre, I think there would be the real prospect of some people walking away from property sales. It is definitely a factor in the decision making process for people buying new homes.

More and more people are consuming ever more bandwidth – with an increasing use of streaming music services, things like Netflix, Amazon Prime and other video content. And by installing FTTP or ‘ultrafast’ we can assure customers that they’ll have capacity for their future needs. The fact that Openreach’s network is open to competition is also a significant factor – people want a choice of broadband provider.”

Speaking of provider choice, this is in fact one area where Openreach’s network is still a bit weak. Outside of BT and a few smaller ISPs, the major providers (Sky Broadband, TalkTalk etc.) have yet to launch any affordable FTTP products based off Openreach’s platform, which is usually due to a mix of issues related to cost, limited availability and other concerns.

Openreach is now building FTTP infrastructure for free to all new housing developments with 30 or more homes (here) and they claim that this effort has already resulted in them providing “ultrafast broadband” to more than 586,000 premises across 2,400 developments (many more are expected to join). All of this forms part of the operator’s on-going commitment to make FTTP available to 2 million premises by 2020.

We should point out that Openreach and Berkeley both seems to define “ultrafast” by the 100Mbps+ definition, which could also include some G.fast where FTTP isn’t specifically referenced.