Openreach Name Coventry as Next UK City for FTTP Broadband

Telecoms giant Openreach (BT) has today announced that the city of Coventry in the West Midlands of England will be the next to benefit from their “Fibre First” programme, which aims to deploy 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology to cover 3 million premises by the end of 2020.

So far the operator’s “full fibre” FTTP network, which takes their optical fibre cable all the way to your home or business, has covered 631,000 premises across the UK. The inclusion of Coventry should eventually add “tens of thousands of homes and businesses” to that figure (once again Openreach is being very coy about giving a specific figure). We understand that their roll-out in the city is starting in Radford.

The operator’s current deployment plan is expected to focus on reaching up to 40 UK towns, cities or boroughs. Including Coventry they’ve already announced deployments for Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester and The Wirral.

Most recently they’ve also started work on their Birmingham roll-out, with some of the first places to benefit including Erdington, Great Barr, Streetly and Sutton Coldfield.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“We are making significant progress in the West Midlands as we get on with building the infrastructure Britain needs to stay ahead in the global digital economy. I’m delighted to announce that families and businesses in Coventry will soon be among the first in the UK to benefit from this commitment.

Our engineers have so far built full fibre broadband technology to more than 600,000 premises and are already working in nearby Birmingham, which was one of the first ‘fibre cities’ announced earlier this year. Despite the challenges of planning, street works and permissions, we’re reaching thousands of homes each week and we’re on track for our ambition of reaching 10 million premises by the mid-2020s.”

Margot James MP, UK Digital Minister, said:

“Making sure that people have access to full fibre broadband, as quickly as is realistically possible, is of huge importance. It’s great to see Openreach making significant progress in the West Midlands, adding Coventry to the list of areas to benefit from the early stages of the programme. And it was really interesting to get a behind the scenes look at the civil engineering work that’s at the forefront of introducing this new technology.”

A quick glance at Thinkbroadband‘s database reveals that nearly 97% of Coventry can already access a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) capable network, which is largely thanks to Openreach’s existing but much slower Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) network and Virgin Media’s 362Mbps capable cable coverage (the latter reaches around 75% of local premises). FTTP already covers 4.91% of the city but just 1.15% is via Openreach.

One rather important point in all this is that Cityfibre and Vodafone have already announced their plans to cover Coventry with 1Gbps FTTH broadband by the end of 2021 (here) and so they’re unlikely to be very happy about today’s announcement.

Lest we forget that Hyperoptic is also doing something similar with large apparent blocks in the city. Aggressive commercial competition seems to be spreading into the FTTP sector, which may be good for consumers (albeit disruptive in terms of civil engineering) but will make life harder for newer alternative network providers.

Openreach also hold an ambition to extend FTTP to cover 10 million UK premises by around 2025, although that is still subject to the outcome of on-going negotiations.