Openreach Build FTTP Broadband to 80,000 Edinburgh Premises

Openreach (BT) has today announced that 80,000 premises across the city of Edinburgh in Scotland can now access their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network and work is on-going. The city was one of the first to be announced under their “Fibre First” deployment plan, which began two years ago.

At this stage it’s still unclear how much the city’s deployment is costing the operator and how many premises will ultimately benefit, although their roll-out has now completed in Abbeyhill, Corstorphine, Davidson’s Mains, Newington, Fairemilehead, Fountainbridge and Liberton. Most of the build is also nearing completion in Colinton, Granton, Leith and Morningside.

Meanwhile Openreach’s engineers are due to restart work (i.e. as COVID-19 restrictions ease) in areas including Stockbridge and the West End, Craiglockhart and Portobello. Upgrades will also start in Maybury, West Edinburgh, and the city centre’s Waverley exchange area later this year. Suffice to say that they’re far from finished.

However, it’s probably no coincidence that the operator has put this announcement out today, which follows only a few days after Virgin Media announced that their 1Gbps DOCSIS 3.1 network upgrade had also gone live across Edinburgh (here). Both now have a large area of coverage in the city.

Robert Thorburn, Openreach’s Partnership Director for Scotland, said:

“We’ve made great progress here in Edinburgh despite the challenges of Covid-19 restrictions, with 80,000 city households and businesses now able to connect to our new full fibre broadband network.

Connectivity’s been vital for city businesses, home workers and families home educating during the lockdown, with record demand across our network. Now, as the nation faces the economic fallout from the pandemic, it’s going to be even more essential.

Our rollout in Edinburgh offers these 80,000 homes and businesses access to the fastest, most reliable broadband available anywhere in the UK. That gives the city an economic edge for the recovery – so I’d urge people to check if they can upgrade now.

The copper network is coming to the end of its working life and will eventually be switched off. Edinburgh businesses and residents can be early adopters to the new full fibre network, with a choice of providers who use the Openreach network to offer services.”

We should point out that Openreach and Virgin Media aren’t the only gigabit broadband builders in the city. Cityfibre’s own FTTH network (Gigafast Broadband) also started to go live earlier this year (here), but their coverage remains comparatively small. Elsewhere Hyperoptic’s full fibre connectivity, which tends to focus on large apartment blocks (MDU), has also been present across various parts of the city for some years now.

Otherwise readers will no doubt note that “fastest, most reliable broadband available anywhere in the UK” claim, which isn’t entirely accurate since there are other ISPs offering 2Gbps and 10Gbps packages (e.g. Zzoomm, B4RN and Black Fibre). On top of that Openreach’s network is asymmetric in speed rather than symmetric, which is what many of their rivals are already doing (e.g. Cityfibre). Mind you none of those have good coverage, yet.