Openreach Confirm 12 New UK Areas for FTTP Ultrafast Broadband
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has announced that their “Fibre First” deployment of Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology has now covered over 1.2 million UK premises. On top of that they’ve confirmed the next batch of 12 UK areas that will start to benefit over the next 12 months.
Since the project began in February last year, Openreach’s engineers have deployed around 2.6 million kilometres of optical fibre. The massive engineering project has also involved a dedicated team of around 2,000 fibre engineers, using hundreds of heavy plant machinery, pole erection units, cherry pickers, mini-diggers, 3000 spades and a small fleet of drones.
The overall target is to reach 3 million premises across the United Kingdom by the end of 2020 and possibly 10 million by 2025. Meanwhile, in order to celebrate the progress so far, Openreach has also gifted the one millionth home passed (Shaun Duffield’s family of 8 children in Leeds) with free “full fibre” broadband for a year (selected at random from the most recent batch of fibre enabled premises).
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But perhaps the biggest news today is that they’ve announced another batch of 12 locations (mostly focused upon Northern Ireland) for their FTTP roll-out, which will all start to see civil engineering take place over the next 12 months. Sadly Openreach has not said how many premises will benefit in each area.
The 12 New Locations (April 2019)
Stockport
Armagh
Bangor
Ballymena
Greater Belfast
Coleraine
Derry-Londonderry
Enniskillen
Lisburn
Larne
Newry
Newtownards.
In terms of ISP choice, BT has a bunch of their own BT Ultrafast packages (G.fast and FTTP based) on sale, but we also recommend checking out other ISPs like Zen Internet, iDNET, AAISP, Freeola and Cerberus Networks for some rival options on the same network. Naturally this is only available to those covered by Openreach’s full fibre and for the time being that coverage is still very limited.
Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:
“Our full fibre build is speeding ahead and we’re now ready to connect more than a million consumers and businesses if they decide to order from a service provider that’s using our FTTP network.
Since the launch of our build programme last year we’ve made huge progress – honing our skills, tools and techniques, driving our costs down and helping our engineers to go ever further, faster and more efficiently. Last month we announced plans for Salisbury to become the first entire city in the country to have access to our FTTP network – in what is expected to be the fastest city-wide network build in the UK.
But it’s not all about being a fast builder, we’re also keen to encourage fast adoption. We recently launched a consultation with industry to decide how and when we upgrade customers to this new future-proofed digital network.
Ultimately our ambition is to deliver the best possible digital connectivity to everyone, everywhere, across the entire country. I believe the progress we have made to date proves that we’re making good on that promise, but there’s more to do.
None of this would be possible without our engineering workforce – which is why it is fantastic to see so many new people wanting to join the country’s largest team of telecoms experts working to expand, upgrade, maintain and install services over Openreach’s national broadband network.”
All of this will no doubt help the Government to achieve their current target of supporting FTTP networks to cover 10 million UK premises by the end of 2022, then 15 million by the end of 2025 (here) and they also have an ambition to see a “nationwide full-fibre” network by 2033. This will of course involve input from many alternative network ISPs and not just Openreach (summary of UK full fibre deployments).
Margot James, UK Minister for Digital, said:
“The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review set out our approach to maximising full fibre coverage, and I’m delighted that Openreach has now reached one million homes and businesses. Significant investment like this from network operators is critical to deliver our plans for nationwide coverage, and we’re working with industry and Ofcom to create an environment that supports and encourages the commercial rollout of full fibre broadband.”
As usual you can check out the fibre first roll-out page on their website, which includes a more detailed exchange level roll-out plan for each of those areas. Direct link here. But take note that this plan is being updated as new exchange builds begin and so it’s constantly changing.
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Otherwise the general locations confirmed so far are as follows..
| Date of Openreach announcement | Town, city or borough | |
| February 2018 | 1. Birmingham 5. Leeds
2. Bristol 6. Liverpool 3. Cardiff 7. London Advertisement 4. Edinburgh 8. Manchester |
|
| June 2018 | 9. Exeter | |
| September 2018 | 10. The Wirral | |
| October 2018 | 11. Coventry | |
| November 2018 | 12. Nottingham | |
| November 2018 | 13. Belfast | |
| December 2018 | 14. Swansea | |
| January 2019 | 15. Bury
16. Barking & Dagenham 17. Bexley 18. Croydon 19. Greater Glasgow |
20. Harrow
21. Merton 22. Redbridge 23. Salford 24. Sutton Coldfield 25. Richmond Upon Thames |
| March 2019 | 26. Salisbury | |
| April 2019 | 27. Armagh
28. Bangor 29. Ballymena 30. Greater Belfast 31. Coleraine 32. Derry-Londonderry 33. Enniskillen 34. Lisburn 35. Larne 36. Newry 37. Newtownards 38. Stockport |
|
UPDATE 1:38pm
Corrected the new list of 12 areas (used the wrong one by accident).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I wonder when they decide to roll onto the next areas of deployment do they expand from where they areas that are already deployed, if that the case Bury is only a few miles from me, here is me hoping it comes our way
I imagine they will keep moving to new cities or large towns – ‘infil’ which sounds like you will be much later (probably)
We are a business in North London N8 and still can’t get fibre .
Wish they roll out FTTP to my area of Bath.
Bath has a ton of GFast instead
The new “12” locations above is actually a list of 11 (at this moment in time).
Corrected. I put the wrong list higher up in the article. Haven’t slept since 5pm Sunday so a bit out of it today.
Would be nice if BT raised the low end of the country to the rest of the country instead of making fast areas even faster……
The low end typically has low subscriber density. That’s why it’s not served well already – there isn’t much profit in it.
Conversely, if they fail to keep up with Virgin, they’ll lose the profit from the cities and suburbs, some of which could be invested to raise coverage elsewhere.
If you want BT’s attention, get lots of people who are interested in fast connections to move there. Of course, it might be hard to get them to do that without good broadband…
Non-commercial areas will be increasingly left behind. As profitable urban areas are covered by multiple superfast/ultrafast providers the prices charged will fall to attract customers, and the reduced returns will make the non-commercial areas even less attractive.
Interesting that 11 of the 12 locations mentioned are all in Northern Ireland. Maybe the £150 million from the billion pound bribe collected from the magical money tree that’s set aside for broadband infrastructure is starting to be spent?
The Openreach FTTP build is 100% commercial with no state funding so wouldn’t make a difference.
Probably just makes more sence to do most of Northern Ireland in one go
Bonjovi: I don’t doubt what you say but it seems odd to see such a major roll out announced at once for Northern Ireland. Some of the towns announced on the list aren’t exactly large population centres, and the inclusion of Enniskillen sticks out as it’s a good 35 miles at least from any other location announced or where FTTP is already available, with no town in Co. Tyrone marked down for development yet. It might just be a coincidence that Enniskillen lies in Arlene Foster’s constituency as an MLA at Stormont? **wink** **wink**
However, there’s pretty much nothing from an NI perspective to complain about this announcement. Hopefully other locations here get announced in the next few months.
https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/broadband-map#11/54.3449/-7.6389/geafttp/
The FTTP already in Enniskillen
**Thumbs up!** Thanks Andrew!
Not planning ahead with their proposed swap overs (copper to fibre).
You’d think they’d look at the areas with large developments (new builds), realise they have to past x premises to run fibre there and do those at the same time to reduce costs (ground works, reinstatement etc)… whilst doing that it would make sense to do the whole exchange in many areas (thus 100% coverage ready to swap over).
Once again we witness a big disconnect between departments.
That already happens in tandem. There is a New Sites proposition for new builds all over the country.
Are you aware that almost every large town and city has had some new development with FTTP delivered in it already.
So the problem then becomes what order do you do things in?
In fact this idea would be a greenlight for Openreach to just concentrate on London for the next couple of years and do nothing elsewhere.
Sorry… I was talking about developments being built… you do realise that the main development boom has been around smaller towns/villages ?
An example is Great Blakenham in Suffolk… 4 developments in progress and another 2 due to start soon… over 3/4’s of the village will be new builds and that’s before counting the next 2… here it makes sense to complete the deployment.
Now obviously there are developments in larger towns etc but you’d need to consider the no of pre-existing premises, the ratio of coverage etc… there’s no point doing the whole town immediately if the new development and premises past only equates to 20%.
In 2018 in Suffolk as a whole the number of new build was around 1,600 premises.
Have looked at Great Blakenham and the new build there so far looks to be around 80 premises, now there may be more a lot more in the pipeline.
The Claydon exchange which covers Great Blakenham covers some 3600 premises over something like 35 sq km of area.
Now you can see why perhaps some new build does not trigger a full build on the exchange, since the time taken to build on that exchange could perhaps have the same number of people working deliver triple that amount on an urban exchange.
“cherry pickers”
Do they make sure that only areas that already have access to VM/alts get OR FTTP?
If it was my money, and I was losing customers to a competitor offering better services, that’s where I’d start investing. Proven demand, and continued loss of revenue if I do nothing.
Not much point starting in monopoly areas where the only return on investment is an extra £5 or £10 a month from the perhaps 40% (guess) of customers who care enough to pay for a faster speed.
It cheeses me off as Merthyr Tydfil has no chance due to the ‘commercial’ aspect. I know loads in Merthyr that subscriber to FTTC! same as Cross Hands in West Wales – poor infrastructure – top level speeds pan out at 52mbps and uploads around 14mbps.
Openreach suck. Commercial or not this is unfair on a LOT of areas!!!
I am considering ditching Sky to go with Three. Cheaper and can go up to 150mbps with decent aerials and Three pride themselves on unlimited data so once 5G hits STUFF Openreach.
This country ALWAYS cares about HUGE populations, with the USUAL selected others.
This is not right it is like the Tories with Austerity. the rich gain, the poor lose as ALWAYS!!!
I’d like to hear how you get on with a mobile only subscription. Think you should give us a review of whether it’s a good idea or not and if three really put their money where their mouth is.
Used Three + aerial before I got FTTC, I do miss the higher speeds but the latency of FTTC is much better, will be going back once 5G arrives though.
Might want to hold off on installing an aerial just yet though until the 5G frequencies are finalized, most antennas atm only go up to 2.7ghz iirc, some of the current Poynting Omni-280 series might work though as they support 3.4-3.8ghz.
Markdvdman: Many people I know would be absolutely delighted if they could get an internet connection in their homes or business premises that could give speeds of 54Mbps down and 14 Mbps up! They’re often struggling on sub-2Mbps download ADSL speeds that are either too far from their cabinet, that their cabinet is deemed uneconomic to add VDSL, or they’re on a long EO line.
As for broadband coverage, Openreach is a commercial business that seeks to be profit making, with some shouldering of a USO for POTS and regulation from Ofcom as a legacy of previously being a state-owned operation. On occasions they are offered contracts subsidised by various levels of government authorities to bring services to certain locations that otherwise wouldn’t be deemed commercially viable, at least for a number of years. If local residents want Openreach to bring a service to them that is otherwise available elsewhere, they need to show that it’s viable for Openreach to serve them with it. This goes all the way back to the early 00’s when BT were encouraging customers to sign up wanting ADSL broadband enabled at exchanges which they usually did once a trigger number was hit.
The reason they and others usually go after large urban areas when rolling out evolved technologies like FTTP is to (a) be available to a large potential base of customers, business and residential, whom are likely to upgrade to take advantage of the faster speeds offered, and (b) the cost per premises to serve the urban area will likely be significantly lower compared to a rural parish where there might be a village of a few hundred and many more spread out for several miles. Such infrastructure providers will go for the low hanging fruit first. That just makes sense. If the urban base take up FTTP enthusiastically, then Openreach will get a quicker return for their investment there and be able to release funds to cover other communities that cost more per premises to hook up to optical fibre.
If you’re in a place where there is no date given for Openreach or anyone else to put the infrastructure in place to deliver customers ultrafast broadband speeds, then your options are either to put up with it for now, move to somewhere it is offered, or don’t wait for the mountain to come to you and look to see how you can solve the problem. 4G home internet is viable for many places where nothing better than a slow-ish ADSL connection is available by landline, especially if it is properly set up with an external antenna. My experience with using it on various UK networks is that it suffers from inconsistent speeds even when you are stationary, often with “bursts” of high speeds before settling down to a lower level before another burst some seconds or minutes later. Nevertheless its worthwhile looking into if you can’t get a reliable “Superfast” connection via landline and if there isn’t a good FWA option available. Certainly beats satellite broadband.
Jed – I am on three totally unlimited. Tethering with the phon in Cross Hands is usually faster than FTTC!!!
Merthyr is good but I do get near max there 76/20 – not always. However, due to the pathetic attempts at ignoring MANY areas that deserve better, I am seriously considering ditching Landline Fibre due to the ridiculous nature of the lack of FTTC in ‘unfancied’ areas!
Actually I consider you lucky to have the option of FTTC. Personally I’d like to see priority being given to those of us that don’t even have FTTC.
@Markdvdman
No doubt you’ll be pleased then that areas with decent 4G are likely to get 5G before “unfancied” areas get 4G. It’s simple economics – if its too expensive to deploy, private sector companies won’t do it unless the government wishes to offer some form of subsidy.
That should say FTTP sorry!!
Large parts of Bangor (NI) are already live for Openreach FTTP.
I believe Virgin Media have recently expanded their network across most of Bangor, not a coincidence OR have installed FTTP over the same area (that already has good FTTC coverage)?!
AL66: Strabane and Limavady have in the last year or so had Virgin Media services rolled out to them but neither town are mentioned in this announcement. Quite a few towns on that list have no Virgin Media presence like Newry, Coleraine, Armagh & Enniskillen. Bangor is perhaps helped by being attractive to both BT & Virgin Media by its close proximity to Belfast and being a sort of commuter town to it, a significant population base and the level of household incomes being one of the highest in NI.
Bangor (Norther Ireland or Wales) ???
NI I believe.
Good to see Enniskillen on the list. Hope to see more improvements to the greater Fermanagh area soon too.
Getting 300/50 FTTP installed at the end of the month in Dundonald, Belfast.
Must say it was a surprise to see availability here, as we had to battle for years to get FTTC (stuck on ADSL at 3.5Mbits) and then a small local operator decided to offer high speed wifi broadband to our area (new build housing development of 400 or so houses) within a couple of months of that happening, we suddenly had a shiny new FTTC cabinet…. which started out over 100Mbit/s potential at nearly 350 metres, right down to 55Mbit/s through crosstalk and what not.
I’m in Dundonald too and notice that the same FTTP plan is available to me. Which ISP did you go with?
Nice to give Virgin Media some competition. They might start improving their customer service then and also their prices.
Amazing. My street is surrounded by fibre and Virgin but because Virgin aren’t in my street, Openreach-around won’t put fibre in. 4mb connection, absolute joke in a half mile road with 200 properties, in a town with 40k population, in a borough with 120k population. Torbay btw.
Competition works. This is commercial rollout so vote with your wallet, get a 4G connection and cancel your openreach services.
It sounds like your gripe should really be with virgin not openreach. Would openreach have upgraded the other streets if they weren’t losing customers to Virgin? That’s why I hope project lightning or an altnet reach me before openreach do.
The G.Fast pod installed several months ago finally went live, can’t order.. only lines under about 180 Metres can get it, what a waste of time. No idea why they bothered for literally a handfull of properties out of 600 on the cab.
VM have installed FTTP so if they ever increase the upload speed to something decent I’ll be off.
FTTP should be the only solution being used now, anything else is a waste of time, people would likely dontate money for a national FTTP rollout if there was a facility to do so, I certainly would.
Totally agree it should be FTTP or nothing, makes no sense to be deploying anything else really, but its the markets and marketing.
I’m not sure people would donate for FTTP (us sorts here would but we are few in number really), as take up of FTTP is quite low, even lower if you remove new builds that have native FTTP as the only option to take. OpenReach are passing millions of properties but that is not difficult to do, actually connecting millions of properties is a whole different ball game and another huge infrastructure project. I’d like to see more emphasis on actually connecting people up and seeing those numbers. Just having millions of lose ends of fibre dangling unconnected under or over our streets isn’t enabling FTTP for the UK. OpenReach have hinted at this low take up in various reports and how they will transition from copper to Fibre, but congratulating OpenReach for reaching these milestones or properties passed is a little premature really, they are just doing the easy bit to tick boxes.
A similar project for Smart meters in every home is a good comparison to the task that awaits OpenReach still, actually getting to everyone’s home and spending several hours or more there connecting up. Smart meters is a simpler job than the complexities of installing FTTP, and we all know how well (or not) smart meters have gone.
I agree us here are probably not representative of the wider population but I think you’d be supprised by the level of support initially and I think it would snowball once the word got out. We are a nation of givers and if the slowest areas were to be concentrated on first then we could rapidly change the have nots to the fastest in the world.
Openreach clearly don’t want to fund any more fibre deployment past the PCPs. In the early days of FTTC they were talking about pushing fibre deeper and deeper in stages. That has clearly stopped with the decision to install G.Fast at the PCP rather than the DPs. Which is really dissapointing. It seems now that those with FTTC will never get an upgrade unless they pay for it.
I think Openreach are just happy to sit back and let us pay for the FTTP upgrade bit by bit via FTTPoD. Eventually everyone will have it. But why not speed that up by having a way to contribute to the cause. How many want HS2 but it’s happening, likely won’t reach as far north as first planned, be way over budget and schedule. Ubiquitous high speed symetrical connectivity would reduce the need to commute and enable cost savings elsewhere too. Instead of spending billions on HS2 we would be making billions but to fully filfil the potential it needs to be ubiquitous/symetrical or as close to as possible and it needs to start now because it’s a lengthy enough process as it is.
@FF – ‘Openreach clearly don’t want to fund any more fibre deployment past the PCPs.’
Read the article above.
Full fibre — amazing and Deluded (outstanding !!!! not)
think Openreach are just happy to sit back and let us pay for the FTTP upgrade bit by bit via FTTPoD. Eventually everyone will have it. But why not speed that up by having a way to contribute to the cause. How many want HS2 but it’s happening, likely won’t reach as far north as first planned, be way over budget and schedule. Ubiquitous high speed symetrical connectivity would reduce the need to commute and enable cost savings elsewhere too. Instead of spending billions on HS2 we would be making billions but to fully filfil the potential it needs to be ubiquitous/symetrical or as close to as possible and it needs to start now because it’s a lengthy enough process as it is
@FF – ‘Ubiquitous high speed symmetrical connectivity would reduce the need to commute and enable cost savings elsewhere too.’
No, wrong, that happens now with existing broadband and has done for many years. Many worked from home with 128k ISDN in the past.
“No, wrong, that happens now with existing broadband and has done for many years. Many worked from home with 128k ISDN in the past”
Please provide sources for your statement.
Any reason why you are against symmetric fibre?
@GN – Products like Citrix only need low bandwidth. Look up virtual desktop. Keep all the data at the far end. Early video conferencing.
@TheFacts: This does not apply to every business. There are many reasons why a simple virtual terminal doesn’t cut it. It may be good enough for you as a BT employee/consultant, but not for others!
Contructive comments as usual from the resident trolls.
Keep seeing the Wirral on the Openreach list but i can tell you FTTP is not available in the part of the Wirral i live Exchange is Mountwood wish it was, i get 30 down 8 up on FTTC we are about 500m walk from the cabinet poor copper i guess.
They are building and some is live on the Wallasey exchange.
Which exchange are you on, and have you checked to see if its on the FibreFirst list at all.
It’s a bit confusing at times in the Wirral Rock ferry (LVROC) is going to be enabled for G.fast soon but new builds are overlaying fttp down the road from the exchange then there is the rollout of a altnet in Little Ness. Wirral council need to sort themselves out with full fibre for the rest of the Wirral.
Andrew Ferguson, i am on the Mountwood Exchange not seen it on any lists for FTTP if you have please can you put a link on here ?
OR roll out their FTTP an exchange at a time with the full fibre programme.
2033?? Seriously?? Here in France the government is rolling out a program to connect every dwelling in the country to FTTH by 2025
Our area (Manche) is being connected up now.
This glacial roll out of fibre and the inevitable limited provision of 5G will turn the digital divide between the haves and have nots into an unbridgeable chasm
Hmme
Well FTTC is not very widespread in France compared to UK.
Starting about 2-3 years ago there was a big push to upgrade to 4G and to provide FTTP nodes in rural France.
I’d be interested to see how long it really takes to get full FFTP rolled out but France is a big place with a huge level of isolated homes and tiny hamlets so I don’t see 2025 happening. But I do see a lot of it getting done and the existing policy of fibre to the mast taking up the slack with 4/5G.
FTTH will never be available to thousands of social housing tenants here in Liverpool and this is a fact.
HYPEROPTIC have bypassed my area L13 4BB for 2 years.
Your fact is factually incorrect. Well done Brian.
I have heard that Openreach has stopped developing fiber to the premises (FTTP) at Whitchurch exchange area, Bristol BS14 post code. I find this baffling after contractors were installing the network last Summer 2018. We haven’t FTTC so what is Openreach up to?
Maybe the CEO Clive Selley can provide an answer please?
I have FTTP near Uttoxeter Stoke-on-trent. Speeds of 80mb down and 20mb upload. Took 6 months for openreach to complete the upgrade from the old copper line.
The lack of investment in Scotland is a bit disappointing, 38 towns on the list and only 2 in Scotland.