2022 H2 – UK Full Fibre Broadband Cover Rockets to 45 Percent

The latest independent biannual summary of UK broadband coverage for H2 2022 has estimated that “full fibre” (FTTP) ISP network rollouts have surged to reach 45.13% of premises (up from 37.61% in H1 2022) and 72.66% are within reach of “gigabit” speeds (up from 69.24%). Read on for details of England, Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland.

The national focus right now is still on enhancing “gigabit” (1000Mbps+ or 1Gbps+) class networks. At present virtually all of this new gigabit connectivity is coming from Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based networks via Openreach (BT), Virgin Media, KCOM, Hyperoptic, CityFibre, CommunityFibre, G.Network, Netomnia, Gigaclear and many others (Summary of Full Fibre Builds).

At this point, some people may wonder why gigabit coverage is so much higher than full fibre. The reason for that is because the 14.3 million premises covered by Virgin Media’s older Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network were upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 technology between 2019 and the end of 2021. But overall gigabit coverage is now growing at a slower pace because a lot of urban focused FTTP builds are simply overbuilding HFC.

Most of the progress on gigabit-capable network coverage is currently due to commercial investment in FTTP, often with only a little support from the Government’s various voucher schemes. But we expect the new £5bn Project Gigabit (F20) programme to start having a small impact on this from later in 2023, before rising faster through 2024 and onwards.

Meanwhile, those still stuck in sub-10Mbps areas will, for the time being, be left with little option but to either try harnessing the flawed 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), opt for a satellite solution (Starlink is good, if you can afford it) or wait for a fixed line upgrade. People taking the USO are being promised speeds of over 10Mbps (often via 4G rather than fibre), but some of those are already finding that they live in areas where not even the USO can cover the colossal upgrade costs (here and here). The government are still examining support options for such remote premises.

Listed below is the latest independent modelling from Thinkbroadband to January 2023 (H2 – 2022). We should point out that the figure for ‘Under 10Mbps‘ doesn’t reflect 4G mobile coverage, which plays a part in the official USO but isn’t included in TBB’s mapping work. Sadly, it’s incredibly difficult to do an accurate model for mobile coverage.

Fixed Broadband Network Availability H2 – 2022

NOTE 1: Nearly all of the gigabit coverage is coming from Virgin Media’s existing HFC cable network, although Openreach, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, Cityfibre and others all have big “full fibre” (FTTP) expansion plans. But there’s a lot of overbuild between HFC and FTTP, so future progress post-2021 will be slower now that VM has completed their upgrade.

NOTE 2: It’s very important to remember that Government / political coverage targets, like 85% for gigabit by 2025, reflect a national average, which can of course be better or worse for some areas (e.g. a few may achieve higher coverage, while others could be well below that).

Take note that each devolved region (Scotland, Wales etc.) has its own policy and targets, which all feed into the central UK figure. For example, while Northern Ireland may be behind on superfast speeds and good coverage for the USO, their full fibre coverage is MILES ahead of other regions and closing on 90%, and we suspect they’ll also be one of the first to achieve near universal coverage of gigabit-capable broadband.

As stated earlier, this data is an estimate and should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because it won’t always reflect the very latest real-world position. But it’s still one of the best and most up-to-date gauges that we have for checking against official claims (official figures tend to be a tiny bit higher than TBB’s due to differences in data modelling etc.).