Openreach Prices New UK Consumer 550Mbps and 1Gbps FTTP Tiers

A couple of months ago Openreach (BT) cut the wholesale prices for their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) ultrafast broadband lines for UK ISPs (here) and revealed that they were planning to introduce two new top tiers for consumers – 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1000Mbps (115Mbps). Today we’ve learnt how much these will cost.

At present the fastest consumer orientated “full fibre” tier on Openreach’s national network is their 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) service. Faster tiers of 500Mbps (165Mbps upload) and 1Gbps (220Mbps) are available but these are aimed at SME business users (details) and so tend to be a fair bit more expensive – particularly given the £500 one-off connection fee on those two tiers and their much faster uploads.

In fact Openreach have technically introduced four new FTTP broadband tiers today, although some of these appear to be a tweak of services that we’ve seen in the past (e.g. 220Mbps but with 30Mbps uploads instead of 20Mbps). The headline change though is surely the pricing for their new 550Mbps and 1000Mbps tiers for consumers.

The move to launch a new range of faster consumer options is no doubt partly being driven by greater competition and demand within the wider market (and perhaps also some political pressure), where gigabit capable services are increasingly being offered as an aggressively priced headline act from rivals (Hyperoptic, Vodafone/Cityfibre etc.).

As usual we must caveat that these are wholesale charges and thus do not include all of the many other elements that an ISP has to add in order to create the retail price that you or I will ultimately have to pay (e.g. 20% VAT, profit margin, capacity, service / network features etc.).

Just as a rough comparison, Openreach’s 330Mbps G.fast service costs £14.99 +vat per month at wholesale (£22.14 when you add the MPF line) and the FTTP equivalent is being reduced to £24.28 per month. Meanwhile ISPs tend to charge from around £60 to £80 inc. VAT per month at retail for the same class of service.

As such the new tiers may struggle to match that of the cheaper alternative network FTTP ISPs but we note that the jump in price to 1Gbps is much less dramatic above, which could make for an attractive proposition on the fastest plan. Not that any home users need or could fully use such speed but that’s another debate.

The new tiers will go live from 23rd March 2020.

UPDATE 4:18pm

We’ve had a comment from Openreach.

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk:

“This will enhance the Openreach FTTP portfolio offering and takes advantage of the latest technology to offer gigabit speeds.

Openreach is announcing this now as it reshuffles its product portfolio to make it more beneficial to all of its customers. It is the right time to make these pricing notifications on new speed tiers now that Openreach have a confirmed launch date. These pricing tiers have already been discussed with customers to ensure due diligence and consultation.

Moreover, Openreach wants to ensure that customers are kept aware of product and pricing updates in advance, to give them the time to consider their potential interest in consuming them.”