Swansea Named as Next UK Openreach FTTP Broadband Rollout City

Openreach (BT) has announced that Swansea in Wales will be the next UK city to benefit from their “Fibre First” programme, which aims to roll-out a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover 3 million homes and businesses by the end of 2020.

So far the operator’s new “full fibre” network, which takes an optical fibre cable all the way to your home or business, has covered 682,000 premises across the United Kingdom and “tens of thousands” more are expected to benefit from today’s expansion (as usual they haven’t given us a solid “premises passed” figure).

The first areas to benefit from this new roll-out in Swansea will be SA1, SA2 and SA5. The city joins several other locations that have already been confirmed under Openreach’s full fibre deployment programme, including Coventry, Belfast, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Nottingham and The Wirral.

Rob Stewart, Swansea City Council Leader, said:

“Swansea is a city of ambition and we want to become a hotbed of innovation.”

This investment by Openreach in Swansea will provide us with the best internet connectivity possible and enable companies to turbo charge their business opportunities.

The roll-out of ultrafast broadband across the city will prepare Swansea for the future, provide the right conditions for our businesses to thrive and support our economy.”

At this point it’s worth highlighting that Swansea is already very well covered by Virgin Media’s 362Mbps capable cable (EuroDOCSIS) network and Openreach has also deployed a lot of 330Mbps capable G.fast across the area.