Openreach Set to Boost its UK FTTP Full Fibre Broadband Rollout

Newspaper reports have claimed that Openreach (BT) will next week announce a boost to their existing roll-out of “full fibre” (FTTP) ultrafast broadband services, which could see their current roll-out target of 2 million premises being increased to 3 million within the next two years.

At present the operator’s roll-out of Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology is expected to reach 2 million homes and businesses by 2020, while their separate ‘up to’ 330Mbps capable hybrid-fibre G.fast solution will do 10 million premises by the same date. Despite this, Ofcom and the UK Government have been pushing Openreach to put a lot more “full fibre” into their diet (example).

In response to that the operator has been busy consulting on an aspiration that could see them deploy FTTP to as many as 10 million premises by 2025, which would come at a cost of between £3bn to £6bn (full details). However Openreach has warned that such a deployment may only be possible with co-investment support from other ISPs, as well as softer regulation and reduced logistical barriers (improved planning) etc.

At the last update Openreach claimed to have found “broad support” for their proposal and the operator spoke of a desire to start the engineering work “sooner rather than later,” albeit without setting out precisely what their final network strategy would deliver and how.

Today the FT (paywall) has hinted that we might finally learn what Openreach’s strategy is going to be next week. The report states that the operator is expected to accelerate their current FTTP deployment, which suggests that they could aim to reach 3 million premises by 2020 instead of the currently planned 2 million. However there’s no final word on what they will aim to achieve in crucial 2020 to 2025 period.