Openreach UK Trial New Broadband Availability Checker UPDATE

Openreach (BT) appears to have recently introduced an additional broadband availability checker to its website, which is designed to provide visitors with more details about the current and future coverage of their ADSL, FTTC and FTTP services. But it also gives you data on your estimated UK ISP speeds via their network.

At present, if you attempt to visit Openreach’s regular website and look across their public pages in the normal way, then you’ll often be directed to the same bland and generally uninformative coverage checker as before. The best this can do is match your address to the availability of either “up to 80Mbps” (FTTC) or “up to 1Gbps” (FTTP) speeds, which amounts to a simplistic result that doesn’t take account of real-world line speeds.

The operator’s ‘Where and When‘ page goes a bit further and gives you a rollout map, with build locations, for FTTP. But all of this is quite limited, although you can often get more details on existing connection performance by using BT Wholesale’s separate ‘Coverage Checker‘, although this doesn’t reflect future network rollouts.

However, during a recent conversation about future network availability with Openreach, one of our readers (Phil) was given the address (URL) for a seemingly new checker that we hadn’t seen before – https://www.openreach.com/fibre-checker. Until recently, this URL returned the same generic checker as mentioned earlier, but now it returns something different and a little bit more useful.

Visitors who input their postcode and then select their address will now be given a summary of what services are available to their specific location, as well as the dates for any future builds of new technologies (e.g. FTTP). On top of that, Openreach has included a range prediction of estimated line speed, which may be useful for those only served by older ADSL (“Standard Broadband“) and FTTC (“Superfast Fibre Broadband“) services.

On the other hand, the speed data doesn’t appear to use the exact same real-world figures as BT Wholesale, since Openreach gives a range that – in some of our tests – appeared to be overly optimistic for some copper-based lines. The fact that ‘Standard Broadband’ is also listed as ‘up to’ 24Mbps in joint ADSL and FTTC areas, no matter how poor the line quality, may also cause some confusion.

In digging a bit deeper, we found that the same checker could also be found under the ‘Superfast Fibre Broadband‘ page too, where it appears to have been added sometime in the last few weeks or months. But we’re unsure why they’re only using it on a checker for an older category of connection, particularly given how much better it is than the regular one. We’ve shot off an email to Openreach and hope to hear back soon.

UPDATE 5:36pm

Openreach has confirmed that the new checker is currently in trial, hence why it’s not replaced the old one yet. We don’t know how long this trial will last, but they’ll inform us once it goes fully live.

An Openreach spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“In responding to consumer feedback, we’ve developed a new Full Fibre checker which we’re currently trialling on a select number of pages on our website to ensure it gives a better experience before we roll it out a wider audience.”