Openreach Delivers FTTP Broadband to 4.5 Million UK Premises

Openreach (BT) has today announced that they’ve achieved their latest deployment target, which means that 4.5 million homes and business across the United Kingdom can now order a service over their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network (1.9 million premises were added in the last year alone).

The development shows that Openreach’s pace of build is continuing to ramp-up, despite the impact of COVID-19. Just to put this in some context, their network added 1.3 million FTTP premises in 2019/20, then 1.9 million in the latest 2020/21 period, and they expect to reach a max build rate of 3 million per year in the future.

So far, they’ve included more than 170 city locations into their multi-billion-pound commercial build, including the UK’s biggest cities (Birmingham, Belfast, London and Manchester). On top of that they’re also building in more than 550 market towns and villages. According to our industry sources, the operator’s next target (unofficial) will be to cover 5.8 million premises by September 2021.

All of this work supports Openreach’s ambition to cover 20 million premises by the mid to late 2020s (2025-30), which is expected to attract a total cost of £12bn (here); some of that will also be supported by public subsidy (e.g. remaining work under the £2.5bn BDUK Superfast Broadband programme, gigabit vouchers and the new £5bn Project Gigabit scheme). Some 3.2 million of this reflects rural and semi-rural builds (here).

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Despite the huge upheaval caused by the pandemic, our key worker engineers have been working safely throughout the country to keep people connected and to continue extending the network, meaning we’ve hit this interim target just ahead of our original schedule [the official target was for the very end of March].

Openreach isn’t the only company delivering against the Government’s 2025 ‘Gigabit broadband’ ambition, but we’re making the biggest investment – around £12 billion – have the biggest ambition and we’re building at the fastest pace in rural and urban communities all over the UK.”

Admittedly there are still many who feel as if Openreach arrived somewhat late to the full fibre party. Indeed, those with a long memory may recall that BT originally set a target of 2.5 million FTTP premises all the way back in 2009 (here), which ended up being abandoned in 2013 (here). The operator then spent several years shunning the technology, until their “Fibre First” programme arrived in early 2018 (here).

Today it’s probably a case of better late than never, although by stalling for so long the operator now finds itself swimming in some much more aggressively competitive waters. The best defence against that is to build faster than anybody else and on that front they’re certainly delivering. But in 10-years’ time it’s likely that they may not hold as much dominance over the FTTP space as they once did in the copper market of old.

All of this represents good news for consumers, which will naturally benefit from a greater amount of choice. But with so many fish swimming in the new sea, that future choice could also be quite a confusing one to navigate (we’d expect consolidation to help thin the options out, eventually).