Openreach UK Rebranding All its Logos and Engineering Vans
Network access provider Openreach, which supplies broadband and Ethernet services to ISPs and businesses across the United Kingdom, has begun re-branding their entire fleet of engineering vans and other paraphernalia – seemingly in order to underline their independence from BT and to better reflect their strategy.
The re-branding exercise actually started, in a very low-key way, a few short months ago after Openreach changed the logo they use on their social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.). Since then, it’s worked its way into various company documents, presentations and has now finally started to appear on their engineering vans (pictured – top).
The last time Openreach went through a re-branding exercise was in 2017 (here), shortly after Ofcom ruled that they should become a “legally separate” company. As a result, the old BT logo was removed, and they instead adopted a clean and simple ‘openreach‘ logo – often seen in purple or blue versions – to underline their independence. This was accompanied by the old strapline, “Connecting you to your network“.
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The new logo focuses more on the ‘O’ of “openreach” and wraps it around their vans in one big letter. The O most typically comes in a bold dark green or blue, which has been split by lots of wavy lines. At the same time, they’ve also adopted a new strap line – “The people that make the net work“, which we’re told is intended to help make it easier to understand who they are and the role they play in digital UK infrastructure (though ISPs could easily claim the same strap line).
Interestingly, Openreach informed us that the change was necessary because their own research data had told them that their customers, general public and stakeholders weren’t clear enough about their strategy or purpose. Personally, that’s not something we’ve seen ourselves, but then most people who frequent ISPreview would naturally have a pretty good idea of what Openreach does, which may not be the same for everybody else.
Naturally, rolling out a new brand is a challenge and can be very expensive – especially when you have around 37,000 people (uniforms etc.) and 28,000 vans spread across the UK. This is why they’re taking it slow, at first, starting with the easiest bits (social media channels etc.) and being as cost-effective as possible (i.e. no big bang launch events), so as to save money for their full fibre rollout.
As for the new branding itself. It’s fine. It’s playing it safe. But the wavy lines remind me a bit more of tigers and Africa than fibre optic connectivity. The branding also seems to elicit somewhat more of a pro-business vibe than a consumer one, especially in its blue colourings on the van. But that’s just my own opinion.
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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.
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should say “The people that take forever to roll out”
No plans to roll out fttp for the area of Leicester I live in, its only 1 mile from the city centre
Here, Here Sam!
But the BT and Openreach fan boys, including Ex-Telecom Engineer will come on here to wax lyrical on how wonderful and sumptuous they are.
Many other suppliers available.
Money is a funny thing hey Sam.. imagine if Openreach had unlimited access to finance, then maybe (if resources were available) a faster rollout could occur.
The real anonymous wouldn’t say that, as they know all the money in the world and snailreach would still dragged their feet starting years ago…
We are all @Anonymous
Grabbing popcorn for the comments. Expect there’ll be an army of brand experts…
…or those saying if they hadn’t done this rebrand they would have rolled out FTTP to 99% of the country by now!
This will cost millions to do. Would have help another area or two that’s for sure.
Thank god, I don’t care if Openreach get near us in years to come, as the mighty Netomnia about to go live soon and VM would have gone XGS-PON symmetric and wholesale by time Openreach get their finger out…
“as the mighty Netomnia about to go live soon ”
Yeah – as if they don’t have any negative user comments.. Use the internet for more than Midget Porn and you might see that, Dude 🙂
Tiresome as the alt net fanboyism and irrational hatred of Openreach is that probably wasn’t necessary.
Of all the altnets Netomnia’s build is probably most similar to Openreach’s to be honest, with the difference that they use XGSPON exclusively, higher fibre count cable and have more premises passed per PON due to using XGSPON.
Openreach will probably follow CityFibre and use bigger PONs when they go to XGSPON, too. They actually seem pretty interested in 25GPON. Nokia are pushing it hard. Most others aren’t really, they’re looking to the more cost economical and earlier to market version of 50GPON with 25G upload and the symmetrical 50GPON though those optics and OLTs cost a bomb right now. Rack mounted kit for a while, just how deep a rack is the question. NG-PON 2 is on life support.
I am looking forward to Openreach’s 1.8 Gbps service, though. It may be the most asymmetrical product on the market by the time it hits retail. I’m including fibre to the cabinet and fibre to the node there. Only ADSL will be worse, and this including VMO2’s hybrid fibre coax products.
Openreach on full FTTP producing an inferior upload to download ratio to a non-upgraded cable company: networks still EuroDoCSIS standard not mid-split or high-split.
Kinda pathetic to be honest. Wonder if there are a bunch of DIAs around the 200 Mbps mark whose business Openreach don’t want risk as their CP customers besides BT Enterprise really won’t be that bothered. They would probably welcome opportunity to take a primary Openreach DIA tail and back it up with a broadband circuit rather than paying someone else for backup DIA.
@Reality Bytes
Why so much acronym diarrhea?
@Reality Bytes, I am not an altnet fanboy, but I also don’t like Openreach, unreachable and have to rely on IPS if anything goes wrong, this is why I call them out of reach. Too big, far too big with too much of an advantage over alt nets to get customer. But then i am not a fan of BT, even if I do use plusnet.
HaHa –
You REALLY need to do some unconscious bias training. Your mind is in the gutter of porn and you wrongly assume others have an interest in that when they are quite happy for many years with someone.
Meanwhile, back to the subject we are actually talking about before your twisted little head of obnoxious comments got the better of you.
Reality Bytes:
I’m so sick of BT / Openreach that have been holding this country back. If it wasn’t for the ALTNETS coming in, Openreach would still be dragging it’s feet and deploying FTTC.
And really not bothered about Openreach upgrading PON:
1. The end consumer service will still be hampered on upstream
2, By the time BT / Openreach have various trials and pilot programmes, the ALTNETS would have already deployed the technology or better.
ALNET fan boys as you put it, can only be such because of behaviour from BT / Openreach over the years. I’ve been on VM for years, they are not perfect, but they still have a vastly superior network here compared to the dross offering from Brokenreach.
oh and “HaHa”, at least one can surf with speed on Netomnia without any artificial caps in place like limited upload like Brokenreach. As I said, the mighty Netomnia (and other decent ALTNETS too)….
@Reality Bytes If you run the numbers 25G-PON at the 30 way split that Openreach target gives you a 3:1 contention ratio on a 2.5Gbps service in the access layer. Given there is always contention somewhere in the network that is actually pretty dam good. It is similar to the contention levels that I put into the HPC facility I design/run where networking is super important. Very few people are going to need better than a 2.5Gbps service. Businesses are a different matter, but there are always options for moving those businesses to a different splitter, and someone is probably working on 100G-PON anyway so just enable the small number of OLT ports for those people. No on the whole 25G-PON is a really great product that is more attractive than XGS-PON by a long shot IMHO. I would stick to deploying standard GPON for now till the pricing on 25G-PON improves and then skip XGS-PON. Most of the cost is installing the fibre optic cable anyway and GPON kit is really cheap these days.
I disagree. XGS-PON is what to do right now hence why so many ALTNETS and even VM deploying it. GPON is the one to let go. It will take time for the newer tech to be at realistic cost and XGS-PON allows for some time ahead yet.
anonymous Netomonia i assume are using PIA
but that doesnt fit in your ridiculous narrative
Wow. This really triggered a couple of people. I’ve a bunch of stuff in the real world to do but I’ll be back to this probably tomorrow: this is great fun!
Fastman. PIA – you mean the PIA network funded by tax payer that Brokenreach now sell to ALTNETS? THAT PIA?
reality
you mean the PIA network funded by tax payer that Brokenreach now sell to ALTNETS? THAT PIA?
how the Chip or should i say 4x 2 plank your shoulder is carrying
PIA was not funded by the taxpayer — another massive piece of disinformation
this forum gets more mad every day
tell you what ill come and use your electriticy supply for the next year and you can fund it for me — you might then have a different view after that
@Anonymous
“This will cost millions to do. Would have help another area or two that’s for sure.”
I suspect it will be rolled out as part of their regular maintenance schedule, so at very little incremental cost.
Jonathan: an HPC LAN is a completely different world from broadband. HPC you’re talking about a LAN when you describe the contention ratios you operate on, and you’re running at, well, high performance levels so your fabrics I imagine are very heavily utilised: the whole point is to wring as much as possible from the kit :). How would the contention ratio look on the LAN links at your HPC institution versus, presumably, your links to JANet?
I remember there being a need for dedicated high energy physics links to campuses to get LHC data from CERN to HPC networks as the WAN links weren’t there and, more relevant, didn’t need to be for anything other than the LHC data.
People on lower usage ISPs average a couple of megabits a second at peak. Heavier usage ISPs it’s about 5 megabits per second at peak. There’s no need for 3:1 on the access network and to preserve it you’d need an insane amount of capacity out of the OLT and from there across the transport and core. Links would be running at a tiny fraction of maximum capacity across the board while the ISPs pay for the whole thing. Even people paying for ‘Dedicated Internet Access’ only have dedicated capacity to the exchange.
Capacity planning for PONs is the average peak time load plus the highest tier sold. Average usage is low enough that Openreach have 1.8 Gbit/s out of the theoretical maximum 2.5 Gbit/s free on much of their network.
Companies worldwide are happily selling 5 Gbit/s+ over XGSPON – 8.5 Gbit/s maximum shared on the PON – and it works with no visible contention or it being so seldom seen that folks haven’t noticed. 25GPON is great for cellular tower backhaul and going forward to provide full 10 Gbit services to some businesses however the business case for delivering it to homes isn’t there at the moment. It needs a lot more time to get cheaper by which time both the 50/25 and 50/50 versions of 50GPON will be a thing. No killer app for such speeds right now – even Steam is capped at 2.5 Gbit/s per client.
Anonymous: You’re on ISP Review. The site name itself involves an acronym, the industry as a whole is full of them so perhaps you’re on the wrong site if you find them problematic. Unfortunately as I’ve no idea which of the various varieties of anonymous/Anonymous/whatever you are I can’t really respond further.
What is it with companies having to reinvent themselves every few years. It used to be that companies and cars, for example, could look the same for years and they’d sell. But now it seems like they have to go through a full redesign every 4 years or so, if not less.
Maybe it is a tax fiddle, if they spend the money on rebranding they don’t have to pay so much tax, well the ones that pay tax.
“The branding also seems to elicit somewhat more of a pro-business vibe than a consumer one, especially in its blue colourings on the van.”
To be fair Openreach is more business to business, though they have been advertising FTTP I suspect this will stop when most have transitioned over.
Well at least they are not doing any net work net zero puns for ESG points
Nah they’re all good for that.
https://www.openreach.com/about/our-company/sustainability
Tops up the tank.
“seemingly in order to underline their independence from BT”
Surely if that was the case in reality then BT Retail would be selling their services over major altnets such as Cityfibre? Can’t have BT biting the hand that feeds them…
Where there are already two high-speed FTTP networks in place competing with OR FTTC, then it makes no sense IMO for BT to stick with OR until their FTTP is ready, but simply serve their customers using one of the other networks instead.
They won’t because in most ALTNETS, there would be an expectation to have symmetric services priced realistically. BT / Openreach like neither 😉
Isn’t that a red herring? Whenever I have upgraded my package to a higher speed this is all done by the ISP remotely without need to upgrade the wires or cables over the “last mile”.
BT Consumer is very dependent on the BT Enterprise network. They couldn’t even buy directly from Openreach without a ton of work and investment.
The colour of the O on the fleet is dependent on how the vehicle is powered, the electric fleet has the green one, the diesel fleet is blue.
what a waste of money. Better put into deploying services and do later. Customers dont get a hoot about their branding….
Rebranding exercise is an expense that could have been used elsewhere.
The cost will be minimal as they are phasing it in
seemingly in order to underline their independence from BT
LOL, yep and if people believe that I have a bridge to sell them
Can you drag and drop it? just asking for a friend.
ad47 uk
another misguided conspiracy theory madman
And you are another who always thinks you are right. Do not always agree with ad47uk, but look forward to reading their point of view rather than be biased to love of Openreach/BT all the time like some.
You must be both whack jobs then
Wtf. Just because I don’t wax lyrical about BT / Openreach. Get real.
Coventry go to sleep little she boy
Mac mini pro, you are such a child, can’t even use a recognisable name.
This site needs to change this comment section so people have to register.
You really think that openreach is independent? Wow, you must have been born yesterday.
BT owns openreach and we don’t know what goes on behind the doors.
You have too much faith in these companies,
Not another one says “Coventry go to sleep little she boy”.
Ok, I can’t be on your spectrum. You will need to explain that as the statement makes no sense to me.
That layout on the van looks familiar.
Anyways. As a non-marketing, non-artsy person I would’ve styled my O on a high fiber count cable that unraveled buffer tubes beneath and underlined my brand name. No strapline required.
Not sure what zebra stripes have to do with network connectivity…
It reminds me of the spaghetti of wires you’ll find inside a typical green street cabinet
Yes a Broken reach green cabinet. Full of legacy copper with shed loads of crosstalk to boot.
There have been a number of their vans out there for a little while with this new design.
Enjoying the usual crock of posts complaining.
“Check your postcode for full fibre at http://www.openreach.co.uk”
Does the other side say
“LOLz, you actually looked. Sometime before 2026, or maybe not at all.”
Can’t speak for anyone else but for me it informed it was available. Much as it has since 2020.
Think they’re at a third of the UK and song a % a month.
This site has gone complete “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, see comments above and on all other news stories.
Just rise above.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/03/openreach-uk-rebranding-all-its-logos-and-engineering-vans.html#comment-277679
I recommend prescriptions of Pregabalin and Alprazolam personally.
@Reality Bytes, Pregabalin is an interesting choice and have some experience with it already for other things but no idea what the other one is and will not be googling it.
It’s Xanax, Cuckoo. Private prescription only in UK.
Thing that annoys me about these pointless brand updates is that you see it reported it always cost around £100,000. For that price they could roll out fibre to a hard to reach rural area that they claim is too costly to provide
£100k will build 333 of the fairly easy though not quite their cheapest premises at £300 per premises.
With the amounts of money involved in building the infrastructure £100k means very little and wouldn’t have been used in a really hard to reach area to serve 30 premises that’ll never, ever make Openreach a profit, it wouldn’t have left the general pit of commercial cash.
Can’t possibly be 100K to do all those vans and uniforms. More like MILLIONS. Given that Netomnia can do a whole town for circa 8M, that money could have been used for small areas or one area right now.
They could have just had new uniforms being ordered and new vans with new branding and let the other older stuff die out over time. I don’t think the public will be in a flap over where the right logo is present.
so anonymous how do you know its costs Netnomina 8m to do a town
how many premises in that town
how is that town made up of duct pia etc
that town would have to be in excess of £20000 as that would give a build cost of around 400 — anything less that that and your costs could be 800 – 1000 per premise depending on the premises you can actually service
you also have to factor who else is there and and now many premises are actually addressable by a solution , any Joint user premises, direct in ground Premises or MDU / apartments might not be able to be served depending if the altnet has a specific solution for each
picking a number out of the tells me all i need to know
20000 would need to be town premises number if your build is 8M and your tring to get under £400 per premises
Netomnia have a budget and stick to it, Fastman. Premises that are more expensive to pass simply don’t get passed.
DiG ignored unless poles are an option, only spine duct overlaid, everything else PIA.
Fastman. Go through their press releases. They state how much and how many premises per town.
Reality Bytes – most telecoms companies bypass if more expensive to do. Netomnia in your example PAY for PIA and they do their own poles if required and do trenching. They use a mix.
New vans are coming with the new brand, old vans aren’t being rebranded.
Not what the news article says.
Read the article again then. It doesn’t say anywhere that they will be rebranding all their vehicles, only that the new brand has only just started appearing on vans (and the one pictured is a new van). Nothing from openreach to say they are rebranding the entire fleet either.
a joke company stole so much money providing worst internet for many years. Companies like that should exist.
ALNETS are kicking Brokenreach’s ass and its good thing. They needed it.
Don’t give a hoot about the Brokenreach fan boys and some of their pathetic defence trolling.
Why the hell would I want to pay any ISP using Brokenreach for a limited service at a higher price than an ALTNET?
Perhaps because you don’t have an altnet available at your property (very few do).
Or perhaps because you want to choose a good service provider. With Openreach tails you have a wide choice of ISPs, but many altnets don’t wholesale. In that case you’re limited to whatever service they provide (IPv4 behind CGN, with no IPv6?!)
Misinformation. A number of altnets either do ipv6, or intend to, or offer a static IP option to get round cgnat.
EE which is a BT owned company, and going forwards is the public retail brand, doesn’t even do ipv6.
Need to be up earlier if you are going to troll.
And when I say EE I mean fttp not mobile…
Why would I want to go with other service providers who use Openreach infrastructure cause in London Community Fibre and Hyperoptic always cheaper Im with Hyperoptic they never do mid term price hikes like other providers do from my knowledge which I know but I might be wrong.
We don’t all live in taxpayer subsidised apartments in London where we have that choice. Most folks that can order FTTP have Openreach or nothing as they have built more than everyone else combined.
I feel so sorry for the poor feckers who can only have Brokenreach. Truly I do. Hampered by a limited service and charged more. They must yearn for an upgrade from a toy product.
One thing ive noticed with this website is the Level
of BT and Openreach bashing. Pretty known to be so biased now . Such ashame as it used to be a great resource for knowledge
AHH bless….
Maybe that’s because BT is responsible for this country having such poor internet infrastructure? Monopolies aren’t good for advancement if they are key utilities that really should be publicly owned… just a thought.
The monopoly went in the 1980’s. Why has it taken the altnets so long to build?
@TheFacts: “The monopoly went in the 1980’s. Why has it taken the altnets so long to build?”
Because altnets didn’t inherit the nationwide infrastructure (poles, ducts, exchange buildings, staff etc).
But then you already know that, makes readers here wonder you you keep posting the same lame questions on ISPReview. You BT support is admirable, but quite mistaken here!
@GN – Altnets should have been rushing in as soon as PIA was available. Why not?
Just another waste of money painting a battleship a different colour. The branding looks worse. Maybe rather than spending however much getting the fingerpaints out and drawing a big circle with lines in it, to then slap on every van, do an awareness campaign with that money so the general public know what the iconic purple “openreach” logo was, and what Openreach actually does?
But no, too much common sense and not enough money burned for the branding team to be satisfied, trying their best to justify their existence I’m sure. Why couldn’t it be a purple O with wavy lines so it didn’t need a total rebrand across the whole of Openreach?
Monkeys and typewriters, very dangerous.
Most of you have no idea how broadband works, I repeat most, that doesn’t mean that the people that do, need to spend 30 mins writing an essay on how it does work, secondly, if the majority of people who dont know how it works did some research and learned how to do basic things like plugging a router in or connecting a WiFi TV, engineers wouldn’t need to spend extra time on jobs explaining and demonstrating things. It’s beyond ridiculous the amount of crap engineers have to put up with for things out of their control. At the end of the day if it wasn’t for the frontline engineers grafting away all day everyday, you wouldn’t be able to sit on your butt all day playing candy crush in the comfort of your homes, that goes for all network engineers from all altnets. If you are that bothered about having a good service, stump up the cash, create your own network, deploy and start browsing
Thanks for the insight I will sleep better now
LOL. Sounds like a disgruntled engineer valuing their customers. Wonder what company they are employed by 😉
In all my years, never had an engineer explain anything.
Just getting them to acknowledge it’s their own network fault would be good start.
Once upon a time, there was a house with a BT line fault. 22 engineers later, including a REIN expert sent that could not be a****, a BT filter fitted above main Telephone Master ADSL socket that started sparking blue flashes every few seconds and wrecked a private (expensive) router on Christmas evening in the snow which Customer Services though was fine to leave.
Oh yes, proclaimed one of the BT engineers, looks like a mouse has been in the conduit as an explanation for why the service died every time it rained or was windy and line sync couldn’t happen. When the weather fine, the line 3.x KM from exchange still managed a 8mbps sync.
New poles went up, new line to house was installed with thicker gauge cable and still the fault persisted on a straight run cable to the exchange (facts from engineer).
Never got resolved over several years, and in the end FTTP came along and it went away.
And FYI in the 80s BT built their own fibre factories for cabling and deployment of a new fibre network but the plan was shut down by Maggie thatcher, it’s wide known search for it.
Great, more insight
Nobody has prevented BT from deploying fibre for well over a decade now, this has nothing to do with an old 1990s Thatcher decision. It’s more down to the sheer incompetence of BT.
I find it strange that their motivation is – purportedly – so heavily based around consumer perception of them and what they do given they don’t really do much for consumers.
They deal with ISPs. It might be an Openreach technician who shows up to do a fibre install (might not be, they use a ton of contractors and with their big build out it’s more likely than not that you’ll get some random contractor knocking at your door) but aside from that consumers have very little contact with Openreach.
I just don’t really get spending money on a big re-brand like this when it won’t make the blindest bit of difference to the people it is supposedly aimed at.
Openreach should spend more money on getting things right instead of branding. I’m in a fibre area and had to argue to get my house added because they forgot to put it on their availablity list due to it having an underground feed.
We’re now on 6 months with open orders and I have half an installation done, with an ONT connected to a wire that goes nowhere and a new duct with nothing in it. They’re now blaming blocked ducts further up the line and have sat on their arses for a month doing nothing about it. This is despite telling me it’s sorted and of course, yet again lying to my face.
They’re an absolute joke and they don’t care. Even with a direct complaint and my ISP badgering them, they’ve still not got any impetus to get the heck on with it. Left hand doesn’t know what the right hands is doing and there’s zero brain in the middle.
I really don’t want to go with Virgin due to it being an older network area and also having zero static IP and terrible hardware but they actually could get me up and running with service and a new, longer duct underground in 1 week. Unfortunately, no altnets and no 5G at my address, otherwise i’d have sacked openreach off a long time ago.
Quote: The branding also seems to elicit somewhat more of a pro-business vibe than a consumer one, especially in its blue colourings on the van. But that’s just my own opinion.
—
This might be because Openreach have the ISPs as their customer, not the end user. Companies like Sky, BT, Talk Talk etc are the customers for Openreach – not the end user.
You lot do realise openreach has delivered FTTP to more properties then all the rest combined and they will provide it to even property’s that doesn’t even make business sense to them, where can take upto 50 years to make the money back. Long after all these small CP have all gone bust( As there all out just to make a quick profit on government grants) they will be stuck with their customers as well and be stuck with the cost of sorting the small CPs poorly built and poorly maintained network
What on earth are you talking about? Fibre put in is not going to be left to rot, regardless of whether the ALTNET exists or not. Consolidation will happen, but the bigger ALNETS in particular have people who used to work for BT or VM for example, or experts in networking. They are following designs similar to BT or approved by them – it’s not some alien design.