Openreach to Scale Back G.fast Broadband Rollout – Focus on FTTP

Industry sources have informed ISPreview.co.uk that Openreach (BT) are to revise down their UK rollout plan for 330Mbps capable hybrid fibre G.fast broadband ISP technology from 10 million to nearly 6 million premises. The aim is to refocus on their new Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) deployment.

Under the previous plan Openreach had aimed to push G.fast coverage to 10 million UK premises by 2020, while their “Fibre First” deployment would work to extend “full fibre” FTTP to 3 million premises within the same time period (plus they’re still working on an aspiration to reach 10 million premises with FTTP by around 2025 at a cost of c.£3-5bn).

At the time the operator made it clear that FTTP and G.fast would be rolled out into different areas, although in practice this could be quite complicated to achieve (the limited coverage and variation in G.fast performance isn’t always easy to pin down). On top of that the Government, Ofcom and many others have been continually pushing FTTP for the future (here).

Nevertheless BT Group recently reported (here) that G.fast has so far covered 1,117,000 premises, while their FTTP rollout had reached 631,000 premises, but the latter seemed to be ramping up much more quickly. Meanwhile the G.fast deployment appeared to be going much more slowly than it should have been at this stage.

Apparently some providers had similar questions about the impact of the increased FTTP footprint on the G.fast deployment. In response ISPreview.co.uk understands that ISPs have this week been informed that, as a result of Openreach pushing their FTTP commitment from 2 million to 3 million premises passed by 2020, they will shortly revise their G.fast rollout to reach up to 6 million premises by 2020 instead of 10 million.

The official announcement is expected to drop in the near future but our understanding is that G.fast will then go no further than c.6 million premises passed, although Openreach are understood to still regard it as an important scale technology and will continue to review for an optimal technology mix between the two services.

An Openreach Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Full fibre’s our priority and we accelerated our investment plans to reflect that. Our engineers are already building FTTP to 10,000 premises each week and we’re on track to reach three million homes and businesses by the end of 2020. Our ambition is to reach 10 million by the mid-2020s.

We’re keen to make ultrafast broadband available to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Gfast allows us to do that alongside our big full fibre build with little disruption to local communities, so we plan to upgrade more than five and half million premises using that technology.”

As it stands the FTTP target remains unchanged at 3 million premises by the end of 2020, although today’s announcement does at least lend further weight to the expectation that Openreach will indeed soon be heading for 10 million covered by a full fibre network (i.e. the largest such deployment so far planned by any operator in the UK).

The move appears to be a rational one, although it does suggest that Openreach’s overall coverage of “ultrafast broadband” (100Mbps+) capable technologies will not be as high as previously expected come the end of 2020. However in the longer term it will help to ensure that FTTP takes the focus.

The operator is understood to be anticipating a fairly even process of adding premises (between G.fast and FTTP) between now to the end of 2020, while the official update is expected to drop at the next August meeting of the Copper & Fibre Products Commercial Group (CFPCG).

NOTE: The specific reduction figure given was 5.7 million premises but we’ve put “up to 6 million” since we understand that it’s subject to variation.