Openreach’s FTTP Rollout Reaches Over 600,000 UK Premises

Openreach is in Cardiff today to talk-up the progress of their “Fibre First” project, which among other things confirmed that over the past few months they’ve added 100K premises to their UK coverage of “full fibre” FTTP broadband (total of 600,000+ premises passed).

The Fibre First programme was officially launched in February 2018 (here) and aims to cover 3 million premises with Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology by the end of 2020. At present 9 cities make up the first phase of deployment (Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester), but a total of 40 UK towns, cities and boroughs are expected to benefit.

According to Openreach’s MD, Kim Mears, work to roll-out the new “ultrafast broadband” network in Cardiff is now “well underway … with tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the final stages of being connected.”

Kim Mears said:

“Cardiff already has a thriving digital economy with widespread access to high-speed broadband – with more than 98 per cent of premises already able to access superfast speeds [30Mbps+]. We’re taking this to the next level by working closely with key partners across the city to build a Fibre to the Premises network capable of 1Gbps speeds – that’s about 24 times faster than the current UK average.

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.”

Unfortunately Openreach hasn’t clarified how long their roll-out of FTTP in Cardiff alone will take or precisely how many premises will be covered, although we note that they’ll also be deploying their hybrid fibre G.fast technology in the Welsh city. The latter will focus on covering about 20,000 premises in areas of Cardiff where FTTP doesn’t reach (here).

We should point out that Cardiff is already well covered by Virgin Media’s 350Mbps capable cable broadband and TV network.