The Top 10 Full Fibre Alternative Networks by Estimated UK Coverage

A new report has been published that provides a useful independent assessment of how big – in terms of network size (coverage footprint) – the top 10 alternative full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP networks in the UK have become (excluding Openreach), which we’ve compared against the official coverage claims below.

One of the challenges with keeping tabs on the rapid growth of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks in the United Kingdom is that some operators often make coverage claims that are difficult to independently verify. This is relevant because, over the years, we’ve sometimes found that the official “premises passed” figures put out by some providers may not be entirely reflective of reality.

For example, in some cases those figures could include part-build networks that aren’t fully live yet and, in other cases, the network may be technically built, but customers in some of the covered areas won’t be able to get it ordered or installed by an ISP (i.e. not yet truly “Ready for Service” – RFS). Similarly, providers sometimes make mistakes in their data, but the end result is still overstated coverage (even big players can make this mistake).

The inaugural State of Broadband Report (Q1 2023) from TBB is thus extremely useful because we get a fairly up-to-date run down of how much coverage has been independently verified to exist (RFS) across the ten largest alternative network (AltNet) operators in the full fibre space. We’ve thus contrasted TBB’s latest data below with the official coverage claims from the same operators.

Naturally, there are a few caveats to this data, which need to be considered for the proper context. Firstly, TBB is not perfect, and they do sometimes miss bits and pieces of network coverage (please email them if you spot this). Secondly, conducting independent analysis of network builds like this is slow and laborious work, thus over the years we’ve tended to perceive that TBB’s latest data can be 2-3 months behind actual build.

The time lag of 2-3 months, which is likely to vary between operators, may not seem like much, but it can create disproportionately large gaps between independent and official figures. Such gaps are most likely to occur during the early ramp-up period of a new network build, where smaller AltNets may go from having a few tens of thousands of premises passed to hundreds of thousands, all within the space of a year. Most AltNets are fairly young and thus may be in this transition phase of gradual to rapid build.

In short, when you see a big gap between the independent and official figures below, please don’t make the mistake of automatically inferring that this is because an AltNet may be overstating their coverage. In addition, we’ve also dated the official claims below as most operators only very occasionally provide an update on their build progress, which will thus be out of step with TBB’s latest modelling.

Top 9 Largest UK Full Fibre AltNets by Coverage – March 2023

We aren’t going to micro analyse each operator above, but we are surprised at the gaps left by KCOM, G.Network and Trooli – particularly given the age of their official figures. On the flip side, it’s clear that a few other operators – like CommunityFibre and Netomnia – are building so rapidly that even the independent analysis is able to outpace recent official claims. Meanwhile, CityFibre is more or less aligned to the independent analysis, when you consider the different ages of their independent vs official data.

As a side note. TBB seems to list YouFibre as an alternative network, but this is confusing because YouFibre is actually a retail ISP that now uses several FTTP networks. We suspect they meant to put Netomnia, which is the operator that is building the main underlying FTTP for YouFibre.