Hyperoptic’s Full Fibre Broadband Covers 1.15 Million UK Homes

Broadband ISP Hyperoptic has today confirmed that their “full fibre” (FTTP/B) network now covers 1.15 million UK homes, which will need to almost double in order to hit their goal of 2 million by the end of 2023. The provider has also launched a TV campaign to criticise ISPs that adopt “misleading” mid-contract price hikes.

The last detailed coverage data that we had from Hyperoptic was in July 2022 (here), when they confirmed that their network had passed over 900,000 premises – including 250,000 customers connected – across parts of 64 UK towns (up from 750,000 in Feb 2022). Most of their deployments stem from connecting large residential (MDU) and office buildings, but they’re also now tackling individual housing (SDU).

However, the provider has clearly now gone beyond that, although they’ve still got a lot of work to do this year in order to achieve the next goal and will need to continue ramping-up (i.e. reaching 2 million premises by the end of 2023). The provider also informed us that they’re holding to their key focus, which is 40% penetration where the network’s been live for one year, and “we’re hitting that“, they said. Speaking of customers, the current goal is to reach 500,000, but they haven’t set a specific date for that (it takes longer to build take-up).

Elsewhere, Hyperoptic has launched a new TV campaign to help highlight their “ongoing campaign against broadband mid-contract price rises“. Admittedly, the campaign is perhaps a bit unavoidably self-promotional, but if it helps to get more people talking about the issue then that may in turn further increase the pressure on Ofcom to act (they’re already investigating).

Hyperoptic’s Chief Customer Officer, Lutfu Kitapci, said:

“We’ve spent the last year raising awareness and lobbying for change on broadband’s mid-contract price rises. Around 15 million households are going to be affected, and we know that 60% don’t know the increase is coming … Hyperoptic has never hiked prices mid-contract. We believe it’s misleading to let customers sign up to a contract price, only to increase that price months later without any transparency – especially in this cost-of-living crisis.”

One catch with such a TV campaign stems from the provider’s own limited network coverage. In order to guard against the risk of attracting interest that they’d end up having to reject (due to limited availability), the new TV campaign will be segmented by geography to target areas where they have a footprint.