Gigabit Capable Full Fibre UK Broadband Cover Passes 10%

The latest independently modelled data has estimated that “full fibre” (FTTP) style broadband ISP networks – usually capable of “gigabit” (1000Mbps+) speeds – can now reach 10.01% of premises across the United Kingdom, which is up sharply from 5.47% at the very end of last year and from 8.13% at the end of June 2019.

The data from Thinkbroadband tends to be more cautious than other reports and therefore only factors premises where live coverage has been confirmed, rather than also including builds that might have completed but where the service itself has not yet been confirmed as live. We think this probably puts full fibre coverage at roughly around 3 million UK premises.

In terms of which operators have had the most impact upon this figure, obviously Openreach (BT) is known to have covered 1.81 million with Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) by the end of September 2019 and are by far the biggest market player (aiming to reach 4 million by March 2021 and then possibly 15 million by around 2025).

After that Virgin Media has completed a large chunk (we don’t know exactly how many premises they’ve built using FTTP but they’re in the hundreds of thousands), while Hyperoptic has completed more than 400,000 (500,000+ if you were to include those that aren’t fully live yet) and Cityfibre is still in their early ramp-up phase but they’ve done c.106,000 (mostly during 2019).

Community Fibre will has also hit 100,000 by the end of this year and a bunch of smaller providers are already in the high tens of thousands (e.g. Gigaclear). Most operators are currently still ramping-up their deployments and as such the overall build pace will continue to rise over the next year.

UK Fixed Broadband Network Availability November 2019

Nearly all of the “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) coverage above is currently still coming from Virgin Media’s cable network, although full fibre and some G.fast deployments have helped to nudge this upward a bit in certain areas. At present the bulk of new FTTP builds are still commercially driven and mostly taking place in dense urban areas, where we can expect a lot of overbuild between networks (i.e. good for consumers and competition but not so good for improving the overall coverage of full fibre).

The first 40-50% of premises tends to be the easiest and cheapest because they’re mostly dense urban locations, which is what commercial players will naturally target first and we can expect these to be done relatively quickly.

Meanwhile the Government has pledged £5bn to help the most challenging (often rural) final 20% of premises, although it’s likely to be a couple of years before the political and procurement processes have completed before building can start on that (here). The latter is also subject to some uncertainty due to the imminent General Election and we don’t yet have any solid details on the Government’s framework for spending that £5bn.