Openreach’s FTTP Broadband Build Hits 2 Million UK Premises

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed that their roll-out of Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology has just gone past the key milestone of 2 million premises passed, which is half way to their current goal of 4 million UK homes and businesses by March 2021.

At present the operator is building at a pace of around 24,000 premises per week and they recently forecast that this could reach 30,000 per week when they exit the 2019/20 period. So far this is all being delivered at the “lower end” of their £300 – £400 per premises passed cost range and they expect to “pass around 50% of UK premises within this range of costs.”

So far this predominantly reflects Openreach’s purely commercial investment, which for the time being is primarily focused upon the most lucrative urban areas. Separately they’re also still rolling out some FTTP into rural areas via existing Building Digital UK (BDUK) linked state aid schemes.

Going forwards the operator has an ambition to cover 15 million premises by around 2025 – likely to cost upwards of £5.1bn (based on the above figures) – and they’ve suggested that it might then be possible to reach the “majority” of the United Kingdom, albeit only provided the conditions are right (e.g. extend the 5 years business rates relief on new fibre, easier wayleave agreements, protection for their investment etc.).

Suffice to say that hitting the 2 million milestone helps to highlight just how quickly Openreach are now building and the rollout looks set to get even faster. As it stands the operator has already set out their deployment plan for that first 4 million homes and businesses (here), but the next 11 million won’t be set in stone until Ofcom and the Government finalise their future approach to regulation and policy.

An Openreach spokesperson said:

“This week we made full fibre broadband available to our two-millionth home, meaning we’re still on track to reach four million front doors by the end of March 2021.

At the same time, there are still more than 14 million homes and businesses in the UK that could order a better service over our network today, but who haven’t yet upgraded. That means they could be missing out on better connections that would allow them to work from home, stream entertainment, and manage their smart home devices without any interruptions.

We’d encourage people to check our online fibre checker (www.openreach.co.uk/fibrecheckerpr) and discover what might be on offer in their area.”

We should point out that residential consumers can currently take a top FTTP speed tier of 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) from Openreach, although the operator intends to launch a new 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1000Mbps (115Mbps) tier for residential users from 23rd March 2020 (here); as well as a refresh of some existing tiers.

However, it remains to be seen which UK ISPs will actually offer these tiers, although it’s probably a fairly safe bet to say that BT will most likely be among the early adopters and TalkTalk are testing them. Check out our related summary of FTTP ISP choices on Openreach’s network (here). Take note that Sky Broadband and TalkTalk are imminently expected to join this list.

Readers may also wish to check out the fibre first roll-out page on OR’s website, which includes a more detailed exchange level roll-out plan for each of the announced locations so far (this is constantly being update). One final point to make is that a small proportion of today’s 2 million premises won’t yet be ready for orders (i.e. the physical build is complete but some other bits have yet to complete), but this doesn’t usually take long.