Openreach Adds 551 UK Locations to FTTP Broadband Rollout UPDATE

Openreach (BT) will today add 551 new UK cities and towns to the rollout plan for their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network. The latest batch of locations accounts for a total of 5 million extra premises, all of which will be upgraded as part of their £15bn project to cover 25 million premises by December 2026.

At present the operator’s full fibre deployment has already covered over 5 million UK homes and businesses (1.9 million were added during 2020/21), which is running at a build rate of c.43,000 premises per week. In addition, Openreach are seeing orders for this service – via various ISPs (e.g. BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Zen Internet etc.) – running at an average rate of c.17,000 per week.

However, the plan to reach 25 million (c.80% of UK premises) means that their deployment pace will continue to ramp-up until it hits a peak of c.75,000 premises per week, and that equates to about 4 million premises deployed a year. In order to achieve this Openreach’s own engineers will need to be supported by those from contractors including Kier, MJ Quinn and Telent.

The accelerated deployment also means that Openreach will need to announce many more locations for their future build, which is reflected by today’s announcement of a further 551 locations. Virtually all of today’s additions are focused on urban or suburban areas, stretching from Bournemouth, in Dorset, Dunfermline, in Scotland, Kettering, in the East Midlands, to Sunderland in the North East, and Wrexham, in Wales.

Overall, more than 2,400 UK towns, cities, boroughs, villages and hamlets have now been included in their “Fibre First” rollout programme. We should point out that today’s list adds 5 million more premises to their plan, which means that it is by no means a complete picture, and more build announcements will follow further down the road.

Clive Selley, Openreach CEO, said:

“Nobody’s building Full Fibre faster, further or at a higher quality than Openreach in the UK. Our engineers and build partners are working flat-out to deliver this life-changing technology to rural, urban and suburban communities all over the country and we’re delighted to be fleshing out our plans with more details about where and when we’ll be building.

More than a million customers are already enjoying our most revolutionary and reliable broadband ever. It’s the next generation of internet that’s ready for anything. You can surf, shop, play, work and learn without skipping a beat – so check out our website to see when we’re coming to your street.”

The expansion of Openreach’s commercial build also means there will be less of a gap for the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme to fill, although it may also put additional pressure on some alternative network providers that were targetting some of the same areas. Indeed, we’ve already heard of examples where project’s involving rural gigabit vouchers have been disrupted by Openreach’s expanded rural plans.

On the other hand, the operator’s rollout will still leave around 20% of premises unserved, which is what Project Gigabit will aim to tackle. Deployment costs rise disproportionately the further you go outside urban areas and Openreach has previously claimed that those in the final 10% could cost £4K each to pass or more (here), which would not be economically viable for most commercial-only builds.

Otherwise, work on these latest locations will start “later this year” and some of them will not complete until the final December 2026 date. As usual, you can view the full list on Openreach’s website, although at the time of writing it wasn’t yet live (expected later this morning).

UPDATE 9:27am

It took a bit longer than we’d have liked, but Openreach has finally published the Updated List (PDF).