Bexley in London Hails Openreach Plan for 25,000 FTTP Premises

The London Borough of Bexley has welcomed a new partnership agreement between its street works team and Openreach (BT), which looks set to see 25,000 homes around Crayford and Erith being upgraded to ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology during 2018/19.

At the time of writing Openreach has so far deployed their FTTP network to cover a total of 631,000 premises across the UK and their Fibre First programme aims to reach 3 million premises by the end of 2020 (aspiration for 10 million by c.2025).

So far 9 cities have already been confirmed under the first roll-out phase (Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester), but a total of 40 UK towns, cities and boroughs are expected to benefit. The deployment pace is now running at 10,000 premises per week and we assume this will go even higher.

Councillor Peter Craske, Bexley Cabinet Member for Places, said:

“We are delighted with the results of our partnership working with Openreach because broadband is now a vital part of the borough’s infrastructure.

Fast and reliable broadband will benefit thousands of local people and make the borough even more attractive location for businesses.”

Kim Mears, Openreach’s MD for Infrastructure Development, added:

“Bexley already has access to extensive high-speed broadband, with around 98 per cent of households and businesses now able to connect to speeds of 30Mbps and above.

We’re now taking this to the next level by working closely with local partners like Bexley Borough Council to build a future proof, ultrafast FTTP network capable of 1Gbps speeds – that’s about 24 times faster than the current UK average of 44Mbps.

This has the potential to completely transform the way people go online, and opens up a world of opportunity. It’s also an important step in future-proofing Britain’s broadband network and supporting emerging mobile technologies like 5G.”

At present most of the broadband coverage in Bexley stems from Openreach’s slower FTTC / VDSL2 (around 10,000 of these were added in 2017/18 alone) and Virgin Media’s ultrafast HFC EuroDOCSIS network, although there is a small but growing pool of G.fast. Nevertheless FTTP has been, until now, barely even visible but that looks set to change.