ISP Vodafone UK Unveil Openreach FTTP Home Broadband Plans

Vodafone UK has today revealed a new range of “gigafast broadband” packages that will only be available via Openreach’s new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool (360,000 premises). In other locations you’ll connect via Cityfibre’s “full fibre” platform.

At present Vodafone’s existing Gigafast FTTP packages (here) are only available via part of Cityfibre’s new network, which aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 and then 8 million premises across 100+ cities and towns (c.30% of the UK); the latter is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025 (here).

By comparison Openreach are separately (here) working to roll-out FTTP to 4.5 million premises by March 2021 and then 20 million by around the mid to late 2020s (2025 – 2030). Naturally Vodafone want to harness both networks (i.e. using Openreach in some locations where Cityfibre have yet to reach) and so toward the end of last year they reached a new agreement to enable this (here).

Mixing different network platforms is an inherently complicated business due to all of the differences in wholesale products, cost and service flexibility, but they already have some experience via their “superfast” FTTC packages. Nevertheless, Vodafone’s original plan was to start making products based off Openreach’s FTTP available in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool (Cityfibre aren’t building there) from spring 2020.

Suffice to say that COVID-19 put pay to that launch and instead the ISP ended up targeting a summer launch. The good news is that they’ve today gone live across those three cities, expanding to over 500,000 premises by mid-2021 as Openreach extends its infrastructure.

Nick Jeffery, CEO of Vodafone UK, said:

“Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool now have some of the fastest mobile and broadband speeds in the UK. Great news for consumers with the latest 5G devices but also for each city’s future Vodafone Gigafast Broadband and Vodafone 5G will form crucial foundations for the cities’ continued economic growth. Gigafast cities are the cities that will proudly play their part in shaping the future of the UK.”

The press release notes that prices start “at only £55 per month” for their top Gigafast 900Mbps plan, which is the same as they charge for Cityfibre’s network. In fact, all of the prices seem to be the same as Cityfibre, although we’re currently checking postcodes to see if different prices come up in the Openreach (BT) areas.

However, at the time of writing none of the Openreach FTTP postcodes we’ve tried in Birmingham (e.g. B67 5AZ) have returned anything but a result for slow FTTC technology, so their order system may not be fully live yet and thus we can’t confirm that the prices are indeed identical. We’ll do some more testing and update again later.

The coverage of their Openreach based plans – outside of Cityfibre’s area – will continue to be expanded as the network grows, although they haven’t yet revealed which of the network operator’s other locations are due to join this club in the future. All of this could of course also start to become a little bit confusing for consumers.

UPDATE 8:53am

The order system just started working and for Openreach FTTP areas we got the following results, which does indeed adopt the same pricing as Cityfibre’s areas and that’s a positive development.

Superfast 1 (FTTC)
£23 a month for 24 months

Superfast 2 (FTTC)
£25 a month for 24 months

Gigafast 100
£28 a month for 24 months

Gigafast 200
£35 a month for 24 months

Gigafast 500
£45 a month for 24 months

Gigafast 900
£55 a month for 24 months

At present the only catch is that you can’t order their Openreach based Gigafast packages online and are instead asked to phone, which will probably discourage some interest. We also found that if you checked an Openreach FTTP area from the main Gigafast product page then you’re redirected to the superfast broadband page and the availability check is reset, which was a bit confusing but hopefully they’ll iron this all out soon.

One other area that Vodafone needs to improve here is their presentation of upload speeds. The Cityfibre Gigafast packages are all symmetric speeds, while Openreach is asymmetric with slower uploads. In other words, the 1Gbps package might be the same price, but on Openreach your uploads will only be 115Mbps instead of 900Mbps+. At present they don’t make this aspect clear.