Openreach Add 12 New UK FTTP Broadband Rollout Areas – July 2022
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today added 12 new places (towns and villages) to their £15bn rollout of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network, which also includes a few corrections due to past errors and a larger build on the Isle of Wight. Some 8 million premises are now covered.
The rollout, which has just reached 8 million UK premises (inc. 2.5m in the hardest to reach “final third” of the country), is currently running at a build rate of c.58,000 premises per week and this is predicted to peak at c.75,000 premises at some point in the near future (i.e. up to 4 million premises per year, which compares with the 1.9 million added in 2020/21).
A big chunk of the new list – reflecting a total of around 140,000 premises – is taken up with the addition of locations across the Isle of Wight, which resides just off the south coast of Hampshire in England. Openreach were initially only deploying across the East Cowes area, but they’re now expecting to invest £13.5m in order to cover 45,000 premises across the island.
The move will be seen as a challenge to WightFibre’s rival FTTP build, which claims to already cover 40,000 premises on the island and aims to hit 78,000 premises by the end of 2023. But consumers will naturally benefit from the extra competition this brings.
In addition, the list includes two locations – Chelmsford (Boreham) and the City of Edinburgh (Donaldson) – where the exchanges were “previously noted as Build Complete in administrative error, but our current scale build programmes are ongoing in these areas.” Overall, more than 2,700 UK towns, cities, boroughs, villages and hamlets are now included in the company’s ultrafast Full Fibre build programme.
July 2022 Changes and Additions
(Openreach’s Full Fibre Build)
| Exchange | County | Total Homes Passed |
| Attercliffe | South Yorkshire | 18,398 |
| Rotherham North | South Yorkshire | 11,436 |
| Colne | Lancashire | 8,374 |
| Ventnor | Isle of Wight | 3,890 |
| Ryde | Isle of Wight | 11,826 |
| Sandown | Isle of Wight | 5,815 |
| Freshwater | Isle of Wight | 3,496 |
| Newport | Isle of Wight | 9,118 |
| Shanklin | Isle of Wight | 4,901 |
| Bembridge | Isle of Wight | 2,564 |
| Wootton Bridge | Isle of Wight | 2,103 |
| Niton | Isle of Wight | 971 |
More than 2 million homes and businesses have already connected to the new network and demand continues to grow – with the company handling around 35k new orders every week. The service, once live, can be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Giganet and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices) – it is not currently an automatic upgrade.
However, Openreach’s commercial rollout will still leave under 20% of premises unserved by their full fibre network, but some of those will be tackled by alternative network providers (as is already the case in quite a few areas). Meanwhile, for locations with no gigabit connectivity options or related plans, the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit will attempt to help fill the gap and BT may well scoop some of those contracts.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I still find Openreach’s rollout odd. They have picked a tiny cluster of village south of my smallish town, they have also picked an medium sized town north of me but my town is not included. It sometimes feels like the list is at random or based on some obscure set of metrics. Thankfully we have two altnets installing or I hate to think how long I’d be waiting for openreach.
May have answered your own question there by saying “we have two altnets installing”. Similar around me, a town was half served by VM so they started in the other half then moved on before going back a year later and infilled, another large town next to me is half served by VM and half not, the half that isn’t is in a roll out plan while the VM served side isn’t while all the surrounding villages are in roll out plans with work pretty much in progress across them all (despite them having 2026 date).
@Rich – The altnet’s started installing and cover both towns and all villages at the same time (and after openreach announcing they would cover the larger town and villages) so that’s not the case here. I’m beginning to wonder if it might be down to the fact the villages are almost exclusively old housing stock using telegraph poles so an easy install, where as my town is 70% 1970~1990s ducted estates (lots of blockages to clear). The big town is a mix but will be more profitable due to size I guess. I sometimes think openreach are letting the altnets pay to clear the blockages and will then swoop in once they are cleared!
@Rich
My city has almost complete coverage by Virgin Media. Cityfibre are rolling out their network across the entire city. And yet, so are Openreach with quite a large area already active. So the presence of competitors doesn’t always make them decide to delay a rollout.
Welcome to the “you’ll get it when you get it club”.
Interestingly, openreach seem to have updated the colour scheme and key on the where and when map. But the dates still remain very much a “sometime between 2021 and 2026” or variations of.
Nothing like a bit of clarity.
You can now narrow that down to sometime between June 2022 and 2026.
@Winston
Huzzah!
there’s little clarity with OR’s Public Rollout xls sheet, as some parts whom are getting sooner aren’t showing on the OR’s search list compared to ones that will start in around 12 months time (applies to bch and new forest )
I wish they would just get a decent way through the areas already announced rather than going onto new ones. Here for example, 1 something street has fttp available, but number 14 on the same street still doesn’t over 10 months later!
Maybe I’m just uneducated regarding how it needs to be deployed, but it just seems a weird approach.
Apparently Programme (Exchange) Build Complete in Leeds Moortown exchange which serves my street but still no fttp. Half the street up the road served by another change has fttp.
I’ve chased openreach for a couple of years, which takes about 3 months from customer services to project manager to a response of it’ll be another 6 months. They now say they don’t have a schedule…
Programme complete means they’ve built all that they intend to, not that they’ve done every home and business on the exchange.
Very few exchanges have every premises planned to be covered right now.
Re Moortown, I’m fully aware. LS17 8 area, everything around us has FTTC or P. Except half a dozen streets of one estate of about 150 houses at the top of Roundhay Park Lane. Where my option is Max Down: 3.0 Mbps / Max Up: 1.0 Mbps
Or nothing (BT based)
Absolute delights.
BT’s “fix” is an EE mobile router, except while the coverage checker show 4 out of 5 bars, we moved away from EE mobile as the signal in the house is patchy and inconsistent. Even outside you’re lucky to get a 3/5 signal and the throughput speeds are terrible too.
Ah, that time of the year to check the list and get disappointed again.
Yep – as predicted.
Here’s an appeal to anyone in the know – is there something unique about Winchester that makes it particularly unattractive for telecom builds? FTTP, 5G etc. Is there a problem with getting planning permissions? Geographical reasons? Something else I’m missing entirely?
I find it surprising that a (reasonably affluent) city of 128K residents gets so thoroughly ignored when it comes to decent mobile and fixed broadband coverage.
Winchester is a NIMBYs wet dream, nothing gets done because the majority of the residents (note: I live there) are dinosaurs.
I cannot say why Winchester is Getting such a rough deal but is may be something to so with the exchange being in the heart of city and physical access is limited. I think VM also has a precence.
Spot on comments as usual. We are a blank spot on the coloured map like so many other places, but we too can’t figure out Openreach’s logic. They are literally encircling us with their build and deliberately not doing our town. We even had our MP check and got nothing from OR other than the stock standard we have no plans to upgrade your area. No VM and no AltNets either!
Time for Starlink!
So on our street, Openreach are fibre enabling the telegraph posts.. Fibres are in, up the poles etc. Even openreach web site has our postcode as “fttp coming soon” – yet the exchange is not listed as to be enabled (West Wickham)…
What does this really mean?!?!
They list these exchanges when they plan to build at scale (i.e. around 75%) and the fibre in West Wickham is likely part of one of the many smaller programmes
because it might be being done under a different programma – openreach has work under a number of programmes — this list is just one of them
I try to avoid this useless openreach rollout lists
that because you dont understand it — which is why you think its useless
Don’t hold your breath. 32 days since fttp installed, still not working. My isp can only get “we’re assigning a fiber technician to the problem” out of Openreach. They also cut off my original fttc on install. Wonderful
I live in Newmarket, FTTP rollout is ongoing in our town, and a few weeks back we had openreaxh vans up and my street installing cables… No idea when or if it will be available for my house as we are right at the end of the (dead end) street. It’s claimed I can get “super fast” broadband, which is actually 2-6MBPS Down and 0.2 MBPS up. I tried all the mobile providers and o2 has best signal, so I currently get my internet through a 4g modem hooked up to a directional antenna which I had to self install, I get 8-20MBPS up and down, so much better than landline, but it’s also far more unstable…. Just really hope FTTP will be available soon! My house is also listed as on VM, but it’s not available due to poor cable signal strength! It’s all very frustrating especially during lockdown having to work from home with flakey internet.
So when will Ll538da be sorted out please??
There is a dangling wire hanging from a pole at chiltern avenue Oakes Huddersfield.please can someone remove it.it belongs to next door but is not needed by new owners.its just hanging loose around the pole please help.no way to report it.anywhere.its not my wire .
I am in an area (Newcastle Wideopen Exchange) that is not on the Openreach official build plan released last year but in December they put FTTP in and 4 weeks later we could order it – I moved to the Sky Ultrafast 500 when my contract was up
1 street away isn’t in the plan and my friend phoned up and it’s not planned until after 2024 so I seem to have been the lucky one, however, Virgin Media are in her street but not my street
Cityfibre have also laid their cables in existing BT manholes and ducts, 8 months on ……. still can’t order it and the website still says “We’re still building our Full Fibre network in your area. We’ve encountered challenges that delay us from connecting your property. Register your interest and we’ll be in touch when we’ve identified the best way to connect your home”
HMMM were you on wideopen pcp 21
I am on Cabinet 20 according the dsl checker
It’s absolutely wrong that Openreach is using its position to double-build where alt-nets (which is basically what WightFibre is) are providing coverage, which at the same time there are plenty of places even in Greater London where FTTP is not in the current roll-out schedule up to 2026 (or is it 2027?). Bonkers.
Private business protecting/chasing market share. Its not bonkers.
It’s frustrating and slows overall penetration of fttp the only real way net builders would stop or limit it is if no one swapped to the overbuild, but that’s not going to happen.