2 Million UK Premises Can Now Access Full Fibre Broadband ISP Lines

A new batch of independent data has revealed that “full fibre” (FTTP) style ultrafast broadband ISP networks are now available to 2,047,954 premises and Openreach (BT)’s infrastructure accounts for half of those (1,003,094 premises). Meanwhile the national roll-out from all operators is continuing to ramp-up.

The data from Thinkbroadband tends a trail a little behind what operators are actually reporting and thus the official figures are usually a bit higher than those above, although this gives us a good indication of how much progress has been made. Similarly Ofcom recently reported that Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) style lines now cover 6% of UK premises, which is up from 3% a year ago (here) and roughly agrees with TBBs more cautious data.

By comparison the FTTH Council Europe recently claimed that the UK had delivered a total of 2,817,000 homes passed with FTTP/H/B (here), although this total seems to be an overly optimistic prediction and we suspect they may have included semi-complete builds that are not yet live with a service (some aspects of a build can finish c.12 months before the service itself goes live).

After Openreach the two biggest full fibre operators, using official figures rather than modelled data, tend to be Hyperoptic (well over 500,000 premises) and Virgin Media (no official totals for prior years but in the last year alone Virgin did around 290,000 via FTTP).

Major deployments by Cityfibre, Gigaclear, Community Fibre, B4RN and many other alternative network (AltNet) providers are also in progress (Summary of UK Full Fibre Plans) but a lot of those have not released any recent “premises passed” figures.

The Government has of course set an aspiration for “nationwide” availability of full fibre networks to be achieved by 2033 (here), although this would require the market to be adding around 2 million premises (not overbuild) to UK coverage every year for the next decade or more. Deployments are clearly ramping up but we’re currently nowhere near this.