Openreach May Stop Selling FTTP on Demand Broadband Products

In an unexpected development, Openreach (BT) has confirmed to ISPreview.co.uk that they are currently consulting with UK broadband ISPs on a proposal that could see a “stop sell” being placed on their sometimes troublesome FTTP on Demand (FTTPoD or FoD) product, which could potentially be introduced in late 2022.

Firstly, it’s important not to confuse the normal gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) service with FoD. In a normal native FTTP rollout, Openreach foots the bill from its own pocket to install the optical fibre cable down your street, but in a FoD installation it’s the customer who chooses to pay for the expensive civil engineering side of that build (desktop quotes for this often run into the tens of thousands).

Put another way, FoD enables you to get a gigabit FTTP line built right to your property, even if FTTP wasn’t previously planned or natively deployed to your area. All of this sounds great, except for the high cost of building such infrastructure and the long lead times involved, which make it far too expensive for most ordinary consumers (i.e. Openreach has tended to target it more as a premium product for small businesses).

The approach taken by FoD has also found itself positioned, rather awkwardly perhaps, between solutions that inhabit the same field, which could be said to include everything from Leased Lines (Ethernet products) to Fibre Community Partnerships (FCP). Not to mention the impact of Openreach’s own FTTP rollout to 80% of UK premises by December 2026, and similar builds by rival operators (CityFibre, Virgin Media etc.).

Nevertheless, Openreach did recently move to improve the availability of FoD, and they’ve also been running trials of a potentially more attractive approach to pricing (here) – due to end on 31st May 2022 (it’s unclear what will happen to this now).

FTTPoD Still Proving Difficult

However, industry sources recently indicated to us that the network access operator intended to stop taking on new orders for FoD from 1st November 2022, with the finger of blame being pointed firmly at low take-up, high cancellations of existing orders and the need to focus resources on their wider FTTP rollout.

Officially, Openreach isn’t saying a lot, but they did confirm to ISPreview.co.uk that they’ll be talking to FoD offering ISPs over the next week in order to better understand their views on the proposed stop sell. Put another way, the stop sell approach isn’t yet set in stone and will depend, at least in part, on the feedback they receive from those providers. Nevertheless, the writing may now be on the wall.

No doubt some people would be frustrated to see FoD go because, despite being an awkward option, it was still nice to have such an option in the first place – however imperfect. Some homes and businesses did end up taking that option too, albeit not enough to make any meaningful difference to the landscape of national FTTP coverage.

The country is now slowly moving toward the goal of “nationwide” gigabit coverage by 2030 (initially reaching 85%+ by the end of 2025) and, like it or not, this will increasingly limit the prospects for a solution like FoD. As will the new generation of LEO satellites (e.g. Starlink). Openreach may simply feel it’s better to get out now and shift those resources to the native FTTP build, where they will have a greater impact.

We only wish that some of the alternative networks out there would launch a FoD-like solution to help fill the gaps, however niche they may be, that may be left if FoD does kick the bucket later this year.