Openreach Unveil Major UK Price Cut of 330Mbps FTTP Ultrafast Broadband

Openreach (BT) has today proposed to cut the wholesale rental price of their mid-tier 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) “ultrafast broadband” lines, which will make the service cheaper to buy for a 12 month period and that could help to encourage greater uptake.

The 330/50 FTTP tier, which is designed to match the top headline rate of the operator’s fastest G.fast product, was only recently announced and hasn’t yet been made formally available to ISPs (here). However today’s announcement confirms that the price for this service is set to drop significantly from 1st October 2017 and the cheaper rate will then be “made available … for a limited term of 12 months.”

The Discounted Price

The Previously Announced Price

The tier being targeted above is considered to be more attractive to residential consumers with a thirst for “ultrafast broadband” performance (Openreach’s top 500Mbps and 1Gbps FTTP tiers are generally too expensive to be considered viable as home broadband packages), which might help to boost take-up as the roll-out of their “full fibre” network gathers pace.

At present Openreach is aiming to make their FTTP service available to 2 million premises by 2020, albeit mostly consisting of new build homes and businesses. The operator is also in the process of consulting on a “large-scale” deployment of pure fibre optic lines, possibly to as many as 10 million premises by around 2025 (here).

Openreach Statement

For any new 330/50Mbps connection ordered during this period, the rental price will be reduced for a period of 12 months starting from the date of connection.

Changes to the Openreach Price List will be notified in due course once the launch date of these FTTP variants is confirmed. A minimum 28-days’ notice will be provided.

As usual these are the costs that Openreach charges ISPs and internet service providers’ will of course need to add their own costs for service delivery, VAT (20%), profit margins, data capacity and other bits in order to create the product that you or I can go out and buy. Never the less a price cut like this is certain to be passed on to new customers.