Openreach Push FTTP Broadband Cover in Wales to 600,000 Premises
Openreach UK has issued a progress update on their £180m investment to deploy a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) ISP network across Wales, which reveals that their network now covers more than 600,000 homes and businesses in the country (roughly, that’s over 35% of premises).
Engineers are currently known to be actively working in areas such as Llanelli, Llandudno and the Ebbw Vale. The operator’s commercial investment in Wales is also being complemented by their £52.5m state-aid supported Phase 2 Superfast Cymru contract with the Welsh Government, which has helped to deliver 34,122 premises of the aforementioned total and may benefit 39,000 premises once fully completed (here).
All of this forms part of Openreach’s (BT) wider £15bn investment to cover 25 million premises (80%+ of the UK) by December 2026, including 6.2 million in rural and semi-rural areas (here). So far the operator has already completed coverage for over 9 million premises (inc. 2.9m in the hardest to reach rural areas) and is building across the UK at a rate of c.62,000 premises per week.
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Suzanne Rutherford, Chief Engineer for Openreach in Wales, said:
“Our investment across Wales continues at pace, and we’re determined to deliver a great service which helps our communities to thrive and supports people to work from home easily, keep in touch with their loved ones and build connections and opportunities.
Gigabit-capable broadband can have a huge impact on people’s lives and it’s great for the economy, but upgrades aren’t automatic. People need to place an order with their chosen providers to get connected and we’ll do the rest. Our network offers the widest choice of providers such as BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen – which means people have lots of choice and can get a great deal.
Even if you already have a decent enough service, it’s worth checking if you can upgrade, because full fibre is the future, and it provides the best broadband experience at great value for money. There’ll be no more worrying that your video call might freeze, or your files are failing to upload when everyone’s at home competing for bandwidth at the same time.”
We should point out that last year saw the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout programme identify (here) that planned commercial coverage of gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 681,950 premises, within the next 3 years (probably more like 2.5 years now).
However, the same report also noted that 327,174 premises in Wales might ultimately need state aid help in order to access gigabit-capable broadband connections in the future, which rises to 984,806 premises (i.e. an additional 657,632) if you include “Under Review” premises into the total. This reflects premises where suppliers have reported planned commercial coverage, but where those plans have been judged as potentially being at risk of not being completed. Suffice to say, there’s plenty of work left to do for all operators (Openreach, Netomnia, Virgin Media, Ogi etc.).
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
They’ve been extremely active in Wrexham over the last 12 months, for which I am very grateful!
My speeds have gone from 20/4 to 900/120.
We’ll soon have a choice of three firms, but your the lucky one! They did my street but not my flats, so my Post Code is without anything even though I’m 3 meters from a pole with it hanging off!
Enjoy the full fat fibre!
Dwight
Same here in Bridgend Dwight,
Some parts of the town have now VM, OR or YouFibre.
Where I live, nothing.
Yep, it’s great. My only quibble would be the upload speed, it feels a bit stingy not to offer at least 300mbps up with 900 down. The main reason for the 900mbps package was the 110+ upload. Truth be told, very few things seem to be able to take full advantage of 900mbps, even Steam servers. However, it is great to be able to do ANYTHING you want and not have to worry about scheduling if someone wants to watch Netflix/play a game etc. Ping times are also markedly improved, 40-50ms on FTTC, down to about 15ms on FTTP and much more consistent too.
Flats typically fall under a different team within openreach, a team will normally come after the street has been built to provide fibre to blocks or MDUs, as is typical, it doesn’t seem to follow any rhyme or reason when that might happen after the initial build though.
There is currently openreach fibre build going on, think they’re building out areas which haven’t previously been done, hopefully they’ll get to you soon.
Sorry, that should have said there’s fibre build going on in Bridgend
Lindisfarne Castle (pictured) is not in Wales.
The media archive is general, so it’s just one picked out at random to illustrate an Openreach engineer in a rural area of the UK. We can’t match to location, sadly, that would be too laborious to organise.
LOL! Library Pic of Openreach Employee? You never know he might be welsh!
VM blitz Llanelli first then my online checker said 1000mbps capible, 6mo later order placed now have a very fast 1Gbps package, although 110mbps is a bit on the stingy side and should be Symetrical, perhaps the 1.2gbps and 1.8gbps trials in swansea may help show BT the light and change to XGPON. Anyway, yeah Llanelli area is full of BTO vans atm.
My area in Ebbw Vale has been under scope by openreach for a while they started delivering cbts and pulling cable 9 months ago..
The pile outside mine has a cbt on for the last 3-4months and tagged.. advised live.
Still can’t order..
Assuming it’s under a principle inspection
Hopefully it’s XGS-Pon enabled so can have multiple providers on one fibre drop.