Openreach Name Exeter as Next City for FTTP Ultrafast Broadband

The city of Exeter in Devon (England) has today been confirmed by Openreach (BT) as the 9th urban location where their “Fibre First” programme will aim to roll-out 1Gbps (Gigabit) capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based ultrafast broadband ISP technology, which aims to cover 3 million UK premises by the end of 2020.

At present Openreach’s “full fibre” FTTP/H network only covers 560,000 premises (here) but the operator is working to ramp this up, which is supported by their recent move to hire an additional 3,500 engineers (here). The initial deployment is focused upon up to 40 UK towns, cities and boroughs, with Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester having already been confirmed.

Apparently further details of the FTTP build in Exeter, where fibre optic cables are laid from the exchange right to people’s front doors, are expected to be announced later in the year. As usual we don’t expect them to cover 100% of the city and so it will be interesting to see precisely how many premises will actually benefit.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“Through ‘Fibre First’, Openreach is getting on with the job of building an Ultrafast Britain. We are building FTTP to three million premises across 40 towns and cities by 2020 and I’m delighted to announce that Exeter will be among the first to benefit from this commitment.

Since starting the ‘Fibre First’ programme a few months ago, Openreach has built a footprint of nearly 70k across the eight cities we announced in our first wave. That’s a delivery rate of full fibre to more than a thousand homes every week.

This sets us on course to hit our ambition of building 10m FTTP by mid 2020s and become the nationwide full-fibre provider. We will continue to invest and recruit in the south west and across the UK to build the most capable, highly skilled, national fibre delivery machine in the UK.”

Margot James, UK Minister for Digital, said:

“We have worked hard to create the right environment to drive commercial investment in the deployment of full fibre.

Openreach’s “Fibre First” initiative is an ambitious programme – it’s brilliant that homes and businesses in Exeter will now have full fibre, gigabit broadband delivered right to their doorstep.”

At present around 96%+ of premises in the city can already access a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network and coverage via Virgin Media’s 350Mbps capable network isn’t far behind, which means that Openreach will face some stiff and well established competition in the local market.

In terms of ISP choice, BT naturally has a bunch of their own BT Ultrafast packages (G.fast and FTTP based) on sale and we recommend checking out other ISPs like Zen Internet, iDNET and Cerberus Networks for some rival packages on the same network. Naturally this is only available to those covered by Openreach’s FTTP and for the time being the coverage remains very limited.

Overall Openreach’s initial Fibre First programme (3 million premises) will see them build FTTP to a further c.800,000 premises in Broadband Delivery UK areas (mostly rural) and new housing sites, plus to around 1.7 million premises in towns and cities. Many of these will cater for businesses.

Openreach has previously also talked about an aspiration to reach 10 million premises by around 2025, although they’ve indicated that this may only be possible with support from other ISPs (difficult since so many are now doing their own rollouts), as well as softer regulation, reduced logistical barriers (improved planning, wayleaves etc.) and the ability to switch-off old copper networks as areas move to FTTP (expensive and complex, while also requiring support from Sky Broadband and TalkTalk etc.).

An agreement on the above is looking increasingly likely but may hinge on the Government’s forthcoming review of future telecoms infrastructure. We should add that deploying FTTP isn’t cheap and Openreach has already indicated that covering 10 million premises in the future could cost between £3bn to £6bn (full details).