Openreach Unveil 29 New UK Areas for FTTP Gigabit Broadband

Network provider Openreach (BT) has today unveiled the next quarterly batch of 29 new UK rollout locations (total of 103 so far) for their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology, which aims to cover 4 million premises (homes and businesses) by March 2021 and then 15 million by around 2025.

At present the national operator has already deployed their “full fibre” network to cover 1.5 million UK premises and the rollout continues to ramp-up (currently passing 22,000 homes and businesses every week). So far this is said to have been delivered at the “lower end” of their £300 – £400 per premises passed cost range (c.£5.25bn for 15 million) and the expectation is to “pass around 50% of UK premises within this range of costs.”

The top fastest consumer (residential) focused FTTP tier on their network is 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) and related wholesale prices have recently been reduced (here). On top of that a more affordable 550Mbps and 1000Mbps tier (currently these are only options for business users) is set to be introduced for homes from 23rd March 2020 (here), although we don’t yet know which ISPs will offer these.

Otherwise today’s rollout update adds the following locations: Aberdeen; Ayr; Aughton; Bradford; Billericay; Brentwood; Basingstoke; Brighton; Balham; Chorley Wood; Derby; Hatch End; Lichfield; Molesey; Northampton; Newbury; Norwich; Newcastle (N.I.); Ormskirk; Portrush, Portstewart, Rickmansworth; Royal Tunbridge Wells; Stanecastle; Swindon; Thames Ditton; Tonbridge; Watford and Wickford.

The announcement has, for the first time, also extended Openreach’s published view of its build plans from 12 to 18 months, which has the effect of providing customers, councils and the general public with an “extended roadmap to achieving its target of reaching four million homes and business by the end of March 2021.” As such the next rollout update will focus on the post-March 2021 period (i.e. beyond 4 million premises).

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:

“Full-fibre broadband provides a reliable, future-proof, consistent and dependable service that will be a platform for economic growth and prosperity throughout the UK for decades to come.

We’re now building at a massive scale. Every 28 seconds we pass a home or business with our new future-proofed full fibre network. This has given us ever greater confidence in the level and accuracy of whatever we announce – which is why we’ve now laid out our build plans right up to the target delivery date of four million premises by March 2021.

We also want to ensure we give our stakeholders – like council leaders, planners and MPs – the best view of where and when we intend to build so we can work together to build as rapidly as possible and help encourage people to take up the technology when it arrives.”

We should remind readers that this predominantly reflects Openreach’s purely commercial investment, which for the time being is primarily being focused upon the most lucrative urban areas. Separately they’re also still rolling out some FTTP into rural areas via BDUK linked state aid schemes.

All of this will no doubt help the Government to achieve their ambition of deploying “gigabit-capable” broadband networks to cover the whole of the United Kingdom by around 2025 (here), which will of course involve input from many alternative network ISPs and not just Openreach (summary of UK full fibre deployments).

However some of those alternative providers, such as Cityfibre, will no doubt be irritated to see that more of their rival city-wide FTTP deployments are set to suffer overbuild from Openreach (e.g. Aberdeen, Derby and Northampton). On the other hand that’s what you expect in aggressively competitive urban areas, which should be able to sustain several competing networks. Sadly that won’t help the overall goal of maximising coverage.

Openreach has also hinted that they could potentially go beyond 15 million premises in the future (“majority of the UK if the right investment conditions are in place“), although this is unlikely to happen without softer regulation, easier wayleave agreements and an extension to the business rates relief on new fibre (currently in England it only lasts for 5 years – Scotland 10 years – but most FTTP builds plan for investment over 15 years+).

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 the announced locations (constantly being update). Likewise it’s worth pointing out that a number of ISPs offer FTTP packages based off Openreach’s network and you can check out our recent summary for a better indication (here). The full list of locations announced so far is as follows.