Openreach Bring FTTP Broadband to 10 Million UK Premises
Network operator Openreach (BT) has officially confirmed that their £15bn rollout of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP technology has today reached the milestone of 10 million premises passed (up from 9.57m in Dec 2022). Some 3 million customers have also been connected (up from 2.73 million).
The milestone and strong take-up help to underline the progress they’ve been making since the launch of their initial “Fibre Cities” rollout programme back in 2018 (here). For example, Openreach added 1.3 million premises to their “full fibre” network in 2019/20, which reached 1.9 million added in 2020/21.
However, Openreach will need to keep ramping-up their build in order to reach the remaining 15 million premises by December 2026. By our reckoning, there are 45 months to go until December 2026, which suggests that they’d today need to be hitting a build rate of around 333k premises passed per month or 74,000 per week. Since we aren’t there yet, then the future build rate may need to rise even higher than this.
Otherwise, the 10 millionth location is in a village called Ketton in Rutland (England), where more than 900 homes & businesses in this rural location can now order an ultrafast Full Fibre connection. Openreach added that their FTTP network has also reached over 9,000 medical facilities (GP surgeries, hospitals and research labs) and over 13,500 educational facilities (nurseries, schools and universities). The UK is home to a total of around 44,000 medical facilities and 67,000 education facilities.
Openreach added that they’ve also made Full Fibre available to the top 25 areas identified by the Social Mobility Commission as “least socially mobile“, providing Full Fibre availability to 409,000 premises in these areas.
Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:
“Today marks a significant milestone in our transformation of the UK’s broadband. Not only will access to Full Fibre technology improve the speed and reliability of the internet connections used by people, businesses and public services, it also provides us with the infrastructure we need to meet the demands of an increasingly digital world. With this upgrade, we can improve the lives of people in the UK, offering economic opportunities, alleviating social challenges and creating the foundation for life-changing technology.
Now we’re focused on the next phase of our build. Our engineers are building rapidly across the country and we already have plans in place that will see Full Fibre broadband reach over 25 million premises. We’re excited for the future that Full Fibre will create for everybody across the UK.”
However, the operator’s commercial rollout will still leave less than 20% of premises unserved by their full fibre network, but some of those will be tackled by alternative network providers. 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 Openreach may well scoop some of those contracts too (so far they haven’t).
The new service, once live, is NOT an automatic upgrade and must instead be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Zen Internet and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices).
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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About time upload speeds were increased. A two minute video recorded on my phone takes 10 minutes to upload at 20Mb/s.
Try doing that at 9Mb/s. Just go and make your self a cup of tea/coffee.
People have no patience these days. I remember a met using a 233Mh/z computer to produce his music, took ages to mix and then upload them via ADSL, just let it happen over night.
I completely agree. Virgin Media is the biggest joke of them all as far as uplink speeds are concerned.
Drastically reduce the video bit rate and the transfer time will drop too.
No plans for fttp in the part of Leicester I live in
Cityfibre have been working on my street for the last 10 days
I know the feeling.
Nothing to celebrate about. Because a lot of the country still doesn’t have any Open Reach fibre yet they are happily turning the copper phone lines off. Personally I believe no copper lines should be disconnected without Open Reach, not altnets, offering fibre to the door. Because a hell of a lot of providers still use the Open Reach network, relying on altnets only limits your choice vastly.
You do not understand what is happening.
They are not turning copper lines off, they are turning off analogue voice, and people can still use that with FTTC, in fact they can use digital voice with ADSL if it came to it.
It will be a few years before copper lines will be turned off,
I perfectly understand thanks. And no VOIP is not the same, because if you lose your fibre broadband you lose your phone. And some places don’t get great mobile reception, or people who may be a bit elderly still want to use a house phone. Also they are cutting off the copper lines, how do you think they turn off the copper voice lines? They disconnect the wires or the cards in the exchange. Also if you get a power cut you lose your phone unlike with copper lines.
Me – no different to FTTP from many altnets. Your point is?
So – you don’t want them to turn off analogue voice before FTTP is available because it won’t work in a power cut – just like FTTP?
I’m not certain you’ve thought this through.
My area went live 2 weeks ago, even though it was live nearby for months before that. I have now ordered a Giganet connection via OR as their own build in Totton, Hants seems to have ground to a halt and I am desperate to get off VM.
We have had openreach FTTP fibre and connectivity to the house since January 2023 when we moved home. We have waited 2 months for an Engineer to connect us inside the house. They have failed to turn up twice. Still waiting…I am not alone!
Which ISP are you with? Openreach have pretty stringent service standards, and when things aren’t working it’s often because the ISP is crap, and they aren’t even trying to get the best out of OR. Effective engagement with OR is often one of the biggest differences between ISP’s Review’s top ten for customer service and the big players.
I had a new FTTP connection fail (stress fracture at the splice in the customer connection box) and my ISP had OR on site within 12 working hours (admittedly split by the New Year bank holiday).
That is strange. Openreach FTTP went live here in Plymouth in January 2022, with Cityfibre just behind around March 2022. VM have been here fir years.
We upgraded to BT FTTP in January 2022. OR were fantastic. Turned up 8am on correct day and had us live on FTTP network inside and out by 9.30am
The engineer even called us the next day to check all was working well.
Contact Clive Selley… Email is available on the internet.
I complained about my install being delayed on a Saturday at 7:38 am. He responded at 9am. Local manager emailed by 7pm. Monday Sky and Openreach confirmed appointment on the Tuesday.
Tuesday they turned up at 8am confirmed route etc. Came back at 1pm and I was live by 6:30pm.
I have heard this before and not just Openreach either, another thing that puts me off changing to FTTP.
I have been waiting for 4 months now. Took them more than 2.5 months to give me an installation date. Then cancelled each of the last 3 installation dates. I don’t know if I should cancel my order with Onestream or just wait because the same can happen with other providers.
My local area is currently served by VMO2, with CityFibre overbuilding the VMO2 served premises. The area is littered with BT manhole covers, so appears to be well served by ducts and has an Openreach Training centre in the town, yet our area doesn’t appear on the Fibre rollout list. Clearly the town would be an easy and fast rollout for Openreach, but for some reason they’ve held off on overbuilding VMO2 and left it for CityFibre to get first advantage. I suspect this is replicated in many locations that would be easy, and quick, for an Openreach FTTP rollout.
Is it possible that Openreach are purposely avoiding overbuilding these easy pickings, to avoid regulatory scrutiny now? And these areas will quickly add to Openreach figures once they decide to overbuild such areas.
Crawley?. OR are active in Horsham (no VM) and East Grinstead (VM) but have decided only to include in their Crawley plans the East side of the London to Brighton railway (starts soon).
OR will have their reasons including estimated market share (their key ISPs), customer cycling, state of plant (desilting etc) and exchange rationalisation.
They are prioritising and we should not expect 100% coverage going forward.
Unlikely that OR would be as clumsy as to make any FTTP decisions based on competitor investments (despite how that might sometimes appear to be the case). Even a decision not to build in a given area can be held to be be anti-competitive if that’s based on actions of competitors, and the penalties for anti-competitive actions are huge. Kill an employee and a company gets fined a few tens of thousands. Get caught breaching competition law, and it will be many millions. You can also be sure Ofcom are are subject to regular complaints from altnets and INCA that claim OR are behaving anti-competitively, and Ofcom have a statutory duty to promote competition so have to take any allegations seriously.
I’d guess that your area “being ignored” is simply down to resource planning on a national programme that’s constrained almost entirely by availability of competent staff and sub-contractors, and that also has a regional dimension, because (with some exceptions) most staff and contractors won’t want to be working away from home. If there’s only three firms in the county that OR can/will use, and they’re already committed in another town, or just over the county border, then your area waits its turn. The programme can and does change, but will only do so if there’s either new resources available, or if there’s very material reason for de-prioritising an area already scheduled in favour of bringing somewhere else forward. Sometimes that’ll be OR finding that it’s especially and unexpectedly slow and difficult working in some areas, or where investor, managerial or political pressure is on to hit numbers, like the not-a-target-at-all-honest 50% of properties expected to be passed by April of this year.
“They are prioritising and we should not expect 100% coverage going forward.”
I understand what you’re saying, but the areas served by VMO2 have a good concentration of premises, which is why CATV originally targeted them and CityFibre are now overbuilding. For Openreach to meet their 25 million premises passed target, they’ll have to overbuild a high percentage of VMO2 served areas.
“Unlikely that OR would be as clumsy as to make any FTTP decisions based on competitor investments (despite how that might sometimes appear to be the case).”
Yet the overbuild risk narrative featured heavily in the Equinox debate, and was used by OFCOM as part of their reasoning for allowing Equinox.
“they’ll have to overbuild a high percentage of VMO2 served areas”
They are, just not Crawley, and there will be a good reason for it.
FW are successfully rolling out FTTP using PIA so my guess it is a more significant dependency such as the Crawley exchange site.
“Yet the overbuild risk narrative featured heavily in the Equinox debate, and was used by OFCOM as part of their reasoning for allowing Equinox.”
Agreed, but there’s a difference between over-building on a logical economic basis, and specifically seeking to harm competition. Because Ofcom have to encourage competition, that means they cannot hinder over-build and arguably have to encourage it, but there’s a difference between OR selecting a location for it’s expected economic potential balanced against cost, to selecting a location because they expect an altnet to build there soon and they hope to squeeze them out. The same would not be held to apply in reverse, because the market power of OR is a material consideration.
Openreach most definitely have not avoided overbuilding other networks they’ve actively pursued it, as would be expected.
I’ve no idea why things are as they are in your case but you’re the exception not the rule. Certainly in this city and the adjacent one altnet activity was the catalyst for Openreach build, no question. This is a scenario repeated nationwide and is to be expected: upgrading customers on FTTC to FTTP provides minimal incremental income, retaining customers that may go elsewhere for FTTP is a very different commercial proposition.
“Even a decision not to build in a given area can be held to be be anti-competitive if that’s based on actions of competitors”
You are saying that businesses are not allowed to respond to what their competitors are doing?!!
Openreach *does* have “significant market power”, which is why it’s regulated by OFCOM, but those regulations don’t limit where or when they choose to build FTTP (or not).
My DP was upgraded yesterday with FTTP with the splitter on top of my pole so they are running at speed.
I wonder if thier build rate might actually slow a little, as they initially may have focused on easy profitable areas ?
Build rate is a sideshow. It’s all about connections.
I was thinking the same. They have installed FTTP in the rest of the Village but left the street where I live as it is “direct in ground”. So they are storing up problem areas for the future (or maybe just not going to do them).
Or maybe working on innovations and solutions so they can come back later.
Or waiting for government subsidy.
The technology is already there it’s just expensive. No real innovation it’s either poles or microduct and swept tees.
Big parts of w5 in London still not part of the upgrade path until 2030+. Best we can get is 80/20 and private run is £40k. They’re going after cheaper, easier areas first. It gets harder from here. Also, we need upload speed.
Frustrating at the moment as I’ve looked at “planned” on BID for the past few months with work going on here and there. I have spoken to Openreach workers who say it’s all there, just testing and going live to be complete. That was last year! Still waiting…
Brilliant work Openreach, keep up the good work.
Hooray! Had an email from Openreach yesterday saying gigabit fibre was now available in my postcode. We’ve had fttp installed since Nov 2019 ♂️
Gigabit Fibre with a severely reduced upstream rate. Roll on ALTNETs with symmetric, that’s what I am getting here as Brokenreach can’t be bothered and want to get off VM.
And how many of them have actual internet, actual stable connection, actual internet speeds promised, working routers etc and how many are now forced to use their mobiles at extortionate prices, because BT, Openreach hasn’t sorted out the VOIP systems.
Anyone in mainland UK that has this is experiencing the same old problems, and the same old excuses from BT, Openreach. BT, Openreach went down for 6 hours again yesterday.
Both FTTP and VOIP are working perfectly, not sure what you are on about, sounds like sour grapes to me.
For all Openreach’s problems, I will say one thing. My FTTP line is the most consistently stable internet connection I’ve ever had. The fibre rollout should have been rolling out at this pace a decade ago instead of wasting time & money putting sticking plasters on copper lines unfit for purpose.
In Esher – Surrey, Openreach are excavating nearby ducts for spine cabling works next month. Surrounding towns already have OR FTTP and Box Broadband have started connecting customers in Walton-on-Thames and Hersham.
Hopefully Box Broadband get to me first with their cheaper, symmetrical service. But either should be better than Virgin Media’s IPv6-less, spiky latency, poor CPE service.
Wonder if there is a plan following this, for those of us living in premises where a “Build is not announced”.
Happy for those recently connected and actually getting service, FTTP I imagine is more than you’ll need now but will be future proof for a while
I wonder how many UK homes are covered by FTTP with Openreach or alt nets #the #openreach figure will include a lot of overlap with alt nets