Half of All UK Homes Now Covered by Full Fibre Broadband
The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband has revealed that 50% of homes across the United Kingdom (c. 15.365 million) now have access to a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which transmits data over optical fibre cables using laser light. This splits down to 49.22% in England, 46.53% in Scotland, 46.09% in Wales and 90.50% in Northern Ireland.
Just for some context on how quickly this has changed. At the end of 2020 the UK figure stood at just 19.19%, which split down as 18.09% in England, 16.99% in Scotland, 18.56% in Wales and 60.27% in Northern Ireland. The vast majority of this progress has come from commercial deployments in urban areas, with publicly funded projects (e.g. R100 in Scotland, Project Gigabit for the UK, gigabit vouchers and others) only having a fairly small impact, although this will grow.
As a side note, if we include full fibre coverage of business premises into the mix, then the UK’s overall figure would fall ever so slightly to 49.81%. Openreach and KCOM’s network accounts for around 32.32% of UK full fibre coverage, while alternative networks (excluding OR, KCOM and VM) cover around 21.23%. Naturally, there’s a small but growing amount of overbuild – predominantly in urban areas – between many of these full fibre players.
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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Dear Openreach & Cityfibre
100% of All UK Homes Are Not Covered by Full Fibre Broadband for Cuckoo Oak area
Get your act out!
Quell surprise bob
There are absolutely properties in the Cuckoo Oak exchange area with FTTP.
Basically nowhere is 100% FTTP. Very, very few areas with ubiquitous FTTP availability.
A quick look at ThinkBroadband suggests otherwise
https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/broadband-map#15/52.6434/-2.4491/exchanges/geafttp/
Many seem to forget that 50% coverage means that 50% don’t have access.
Hello from the 49.9999999%
Interesting how Northern Ireland is ahead of the home nations with the FTTP rollout at just over 90% able to get a gigabit capable connection compared to England, Scotland and Wales.
Are they rolling out the infrastructure in a different and more effective manner to the rest of the UK, if so can the rest of the UK learn from Northern Ireland?
I’m guessing it’s because Northern Ireland is due to a lot of smaller reasons, i.e. more urbanised (since it was the half Westminster clearly preferred and invested in), physically smaller and with less homes.
More urbanised? Than Scotland, Wales, and England away from the main conurbations? You’ve not visited NI it would seem.
Whilst they’ve been successful in FTTP rollout, it’s worth reflecting on the latest Ofcom Connected Nations report published in December 2022, that (noting a modest difference in timing to the latest coverage data) showed average fixed line broadband speeds for Norn Iron of 115 Mbps.
Given the circa 90% availability it would seem that rather a lot of people really aren’t at all fussed about speed, and potentially many are still happily using twisted pair FTTC. Since that won’t be a message government want playing out, I assume people in the region will start to see better pricing for faster speeds, as the machinery of government endeavours to make true the outcome it wanted.
NI has less than 25% the population of London so there are far less homes to cover and spread much less than Wales
NI had a lot more properties than any other home nation falling to reach 24 Mbit via FTTC. Longer lines from cabinets and high rates of exchange only lines.
“…more urbanised…”
In Great Britain, the percentage of the population that are defined as living in a “rural” area is 12%. In Northern Ireland it’s 35% – while the two metrics are not the exact same, saying NI is “more urbainsed” than GB is essentially announcing that you’ve never been to Northern Ireland without directly saying that you’ve never been to Northern Ireland (except maybe to Belfast). There’s a lot of small villages, many small farm holdings and one-off housing in the countryside here, the population profile is a lot closer to the Republic next door than to GB across the Irish Sea.
Aside from that, NI has a record of quick rollouts of landline broadband delivery to even some very rural locations compared to GB, essentially “full” ADSL broadband was rolled out to every exchange by 2005 and FTTC was also quickly rolled out here starting in 2010/11. Both cases received support from the NI Assembly, but Openreach’s recent FTTP rollout has been commercially driven.
The big problem for Openreach now is getting to that final 10% or so of properties that they haven’t covered with FTTP yet, most of these are properties whereby current copper pair lengths are considerably long, where even FTTC isn’t much of a help beyond slow ADSL speeds. Some of these properties are being covered by Fibrus via Project Stratum, but this takes time. If you look at the monthly figures published by Think Broadband it often notes that the percentage of properties in NI that can’t even get a better than 2 Mb/s ADSL download speed is roughly constant at 2.5%, higher than nearly all regions in GB. That’s potentially the most difficult/costly to upgrade, but if it gets done then it’s done for the foreseeable future.
Northern Ireland secured £1 billion of funding from Theresa May as a result of the Ill -conceived confidence and supply agreement with the DUP. We were mugs to agree.
This went on infrastructure in NI including fibre.
Carl Conrad: Part of that £1 billion deal (£160 million IIRC) went to fund Project Stratum, which is subsidising Fibrus (whom won the contract) in rolling out FTTP to hard to reach rural parts of Northern Ireland. To the best of my knowledge, none of that funding went towards Fibrus’ own commercial FTTP deployment or any of Openreach’s FTTP deployment in NI either.
Is it because NI doesn’t have a government?
Looking forward to the alts beating openreach at their game, a 10% gap is nothing considering the huge headstart and how combined build rates are superior. Curious as to how the “altnet bubble” mob will react
What percentage of that Altnet fibre coverage is in rural locations?
It’s a ten *point* gap between the incumbents and all altnets combined, in percentage terms the OR/KCOM networks cover 150% of the properties that all the altnets do.
The only altnet with national (albeit urban focused) ambitions is CityFibre, and if they get absorbed by Liberty then I’d argue they’re not an alternative network any more.
Sam: “Curious as to how the “altnet bubble” mob will react”
Thank you for the invitation. The altnets are never going to beat Openreach at their own game. If we take INCA figures as credible, since they’re the mouthpiece of the altnet industry, by 2025 altnets will have passed 10.5m properties at a capital cost of £17.7bn. Woohooo! Hold on, that’s £1,680 per property passed, and before the accumulated operating losses which I’d hazard a guess will probably add around 20% to that figure. The altnets can never compete.
Take VM – fixed assets of £10bn, and passing 16m homes, that’s £625 per property but even the £10bn includes all O2 infrastructure. Where is the altnet business case against that? How are cash-haemorrhaging altnets going to beat OR when they stand no chance of ever covering their cost of capital?
And then we get to the magic conversion figure. Rapid build and coverage is all very well, a good way of spending money, yet average speeds somebody posted above show OR haven’t got very impressive conversion rates for NI. Why will an altnet break through customer indifference? Look what happened to Trooli – 275k properties passed and bog all customers, resulting in a distressed sale, and the new owners are still going to struggle to get a credible ROCE unless they can find a bigger mug.
Q: How do you make a small fortune in altnet fibre?
A: You start with a large fortune.
Hohoho! I’m here all week folks! Throw money not flowers!
And just to be clear, some altnets will survive, some but not all of the assets built will be retained. But much will be lost, along with a vast amount of risk-capital that will disappear into thin air. No altnet has yet demonstrated a clear business model that is cash generative, covers capital costs and is sustainable in a competitive market.
Total altnet coverage isn’t going to catch up with Openreach, Sam. There’s going to be increasing amounts of overbuild and probably a third of the Openreach build will only have Virgin Media as a competitor with genuine altnets combined getting to less than half the UK.
The ones charging high prices due to high cost of rural coverage are in a bunch of cases going to be overbuilt by Openreach and/or Liberty Global and go out of business.
The low cost operators are overbuilding Openreach, Virgin Media and in some cases CityFibre, too.
The amount of premises with an altnet and no Openreach is probably going to end up being pretty small. Need scale to spread the cost of the expensive builds without having uncompetitive pricing and few altnets will have that scale alongside a desire to build in the expensive areas. Costs too much, takes too long.
There are two basic altnet business cases:
1. To undercut Openreach’s regulated wholesale pricing. This is the approach of Vodafone+Cityfibre: if you can retail broadband at £1 per month cheaper than the competition, especially from a known brand, you’ll get decent volume of take-up. Most people don’t care whether it’s FTTP or FTTC, just that it’s cheap.
2. To provide good service in those areas where the Openreach service is terrible. This is the approach of Gigaclear, and in the short term allows them to charge a premium, but it’s risky because (a) it’s expensive to build, and (b) Openreach could still turn up with FTTP at any time.
1.7k per premise does not seem credible. Even using a 30 arpu and a very good 30% takeup, it would over 15 years to pay back. Any banks lending debt can do this very basic math. While there are many dumb investors out there, the number is just far too high and not all of them are putting high prices like Trooli
The altnets combined are building more than openreach so it is a matter of time, not if
John: “1.7k per premise does not seem credible”
Well, you’ll have to take that up with INCA as they published the figures.
Unfortunately, I think they’re probably correct, because crude “cost per property passed” numbers don’t properly take account of the accrued losses during the first five years or so of operation, the impact of churn, nor the costs of establishing and running the business and connectivity side of things. It’s also worth noting that the widely used homes passed metric doesn’t give genuinely ready for service numbers until the drop links go in. Those only get installed when an order is placed, and as a generalisation across operators (altnet, VM or OR) that’s typically a two man job that you’d need to budget about three hours including transport and setup – at fully loaded labour costs that’ll be another couple of hundred quid per property actually connected, and that’s not in the breathlessly enthusiastic announcements that the altnets are churning out now.
Why are lenders involved if it’s all so obviously doomed? Because there’s a gold rush on, like every investment frenzy since forever, and in those situations entire markets become convinced that financial gravity has been permanently suspended. There’s so many examples its barely possible to list them all, eg UK housing, New Zealand, Irish, Finland, US, Spanish, Dutch housing for that matter, Japanese stocks, tulips, multiple banking failures time and time and time again, UK railways, US dotcom stocks, bitcoin, Japanese property, junk bonds, Lloyds names, Wall Street 1901, again in 1929, again in 1987, British canals, British turnpikes, various silver, gold, copper, uranium bubbles, classic cars, fine art, fine wines, antique whisky, the Mississippi bubble, the South Sea bubble, container shipping, etc etc….you’re getting the picture? And that picture across all of financial history is that the big grown up men of finance are in fact quite often financially illiterate sheep, and every few years they get it massively and disastrously wrong.
You’re mad if you believe even half the companies are having a cost per premise passed of 2k, no wonder you’re “altnet bubble” mob
There are obviously players who are destined for fail or at least mediocrity but there are at least a handful of them who have a strong case
Nearly half of your examples are actually performing well:
House prices even in the face of rising interest rates are holding quite well
Tech stocks are doing great with TSLA, META up 60% this year, APPL 20%, GME 35%
Gold all time highs and does well in the face of inflation
Art is going for insane prices with even new artists such as Banksy selling literal rags for millions
Bitcoin is literally 100% up over the last 4 months. It was created after the 2008 socialist bank bailouts and will be the tried and tested tech against CBDCs
Just like I can pick the above winners, I can pick a few altnet winners
Not all area have full fibre to the permises, business, and flats that need the most also don’t have full fibre as I call bt and they said it wouldn’t be until 2026 inwhich I am fighting I my local area south east london and still all providers don’t want us to have it
@Mark, just out curiousity when did the FTTP rollout start, when did the first home get a fibre connection?
openreach did circa 10000 FTTP prem trials in Bradwell abbey Milton Keynes and Muswell Hill in about 2012/2013 from memory
I doubt he knows, even doing a search on the net don’t up any decnet answers.
I saw this on the openreachsite for 2008, In another first we brought Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) to a new 1,000 acre greenfield site in Kent. This offered speeds of up to 100Mb – at the time the fastest available speed to UK home customers.
Then in 2009, We began pilots of Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology in Muswell Hill, North London and Whitchurch, South Glamorgan, delivering download speeds of up to 40Mb.
It would have been better if they had done FTTP in 2009, but FTTC was cheaper I suppose.
People are saying well done to Openreach for having half of UK homes covered by FTTP, but ther UK have been behind the times for so many years. I think the only reason Openreach are moving their backside now is because
(1) altnets are getting their first and they are worried about losing money and
(2) It is starting to cost them more to replace old equipment that are failing.
I am pretty sure if Openreach could carry on propping up the system they have now for minimal costs, they would.
I almost ordered ZZoomm yeasterday, went right to the end when they ask to pick an installation date, and then backed out.
Trials were done a while back but the first one of any scale was new build at Ebbsfleet in 2008.
Milton Keynes was the first brownfield of any scale with small trials done in London beforehand.
Amusingly a number of experts were confused why the initial Ebbsfleet trial speed planned was the slowest full fibre speed in Europe at 2.5 Mbit.
@AD47uk. It’s a matter of public record that openreach in 2010 had committed to delivering FTTP to 25% off the country , but government intervention in the broadband market (BDUk) derailed that. It’s no coincidence that once the BDUK contracts had been met that openreach went back to the FTTP drawing board
Whole of London residential and businesses should of had access to Fibre by now yet there are parts of area in London without access to broadband.
councils are pushing for fibre to be built in social and affordable housing problem is when some housing association do not corporate well with some providers who build there own fibre network.
Still waiting here in our part of Lincolnshire. Watching altnets spring up in the urban areas but the rural gaps of FTTP nobody seems interested in
A certain Russian-backed altnet was very keen to build FTTP to certain locations in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, but they seemed to be bogged down in a minor legal dispute at the moment.
Hate to inform the writer but the r100 program isn’t full fibre, you haven’t done your research
R100 LOT 1 (North Scotland and the Highlands) is expected to cover around 59,000 premises (100% via FTTP) by 2027/28, while LOT 2 (Central Scotland) will reach 32,000 premises (95.6% via FTTP and the rest FTTC) by 2023/24 and LOT 3 (Southern Scotland) will reach 21,000 premises (100% via FTTP) by 2024/25. Seems pretty full fibre orientated to me.
Isn’t it the case that Openreach and KCOM FTTP covers over 32% of UK *homes* not of UK FTTP as written above.
50%, what a load of rubbish! I bet of the “supposed” 50% around 90% of them are on new builds. There are literally thousands of towns in the UK with just homes built in the last 5 years having full fiber, those living 100 yards down the road will never ever get it.
You seem to be struggling with the concept of 50% FTTP coverage leaving 50% uncovered.
I’m not sure where in the UK you are and I’m pretty sure you said something similar in the past but the UK certainly hasn’t built 13 million homes in the last 5 years.
Or indeed the last 30 years combined.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/9468-new-record-set-for-amount-of-openreach-added-in-a-month
If you’ve a reason to disagree with this data drop Andrew an email.
Well I certainly don’t believe for one second half the UK has access to FTTP in 2023. I don’t know how anyone would for that matter.
I believe it because TBB say so, Ofcom say so, various network builders say so, and in both my local area and every previous address there’s extensive FTTP availability or imminent build. I’ve no reason to think any are especially exceptional.
I have 3 different full fibre networks serving me. None of them Virgin Media. Surrounds have 3 + Virgin Media cable with the 3 full fibre networks in ongoing build in the local area.
Every large town and city nearby has CityFibre, Virgin Media and Openreach FTTP to a greater or lesser extent with a couple of other altnets building in some cases over Openreach in others in rural areas.
Genuinely nothing exceptional about the areas I spend time in. 50% is perfectly believable given the amount of money being spent.
@Reality Bytes – you are certainly one of the lucky ones. I live in Winchester, Hampshire which has pretty much non-existent FTTP. Around 50% of the properties can get VM, the rest are on FTTC. Some new builds have FTTP, but that’s about it (<10% of properties when I last checked). Giganet is starting to roll out, but no idea if any addresses are live yet. Openreach has excluded us, so has Cityfibre. Giganet is the only hope, but they could take years.
Yes, Sonic, very fortunate indeed as are the local area but this is something people will see a lot more of as time goes on for sure.
Altnets certainly won’t match Openreach for coverage but there are definitely some locations that can support 2, 3 or 4 networks as the build is fairly painless, the properties close together and backhaul easily available.
Openreach will definitely cover Winchester just a question of time. It’s not the easiest exchange but neither is it really awful last I heard.
@Buggerlugz
By all means have a gripe about your local area, I certainly do about mine. My FTTC cabinet has been full since the first covid lockdown so my options are limited to 6Mbps ADSL2+ or mobile broadband. I’m urban so there are no gigabit vouchers available, and BDUK say I have superfast service available even though I can’t actually order it because ‘waiting list’. I get wound up every time someone complains about lack of FTTP in their area but it turns out they have Virgin Media available.
Openreach could have relieved the congestion at my local cabinet by spending a few hundred pounds on some retro new build FTTP in pristine ducts built in the last 5 years, but they have chosen not to. I assume that’s because their 4G USO mobile broadband product is much more profitable. Whatever their reason, it’s their choice but very short-sighted of them. My choice is that I will never take another Openreach service as long as I live.
But disputing the Ofcom figures that have been independently verified by thinkbroadband does nothing to enhance your reputation and diminishes the value of everything else you post here.
@CJ
Openreach do have a programme of retro new build FTTP which is different from their main build. I believe it’s considered a quick win in terms of increasing FTTP coverage.
As such, its possible they your area may be in scope for this.
Looking at some of the comments on here, it seems as if some people don’t want any Alt nets at all and want Openreach to do it all. That would not be good, Alt nets for one will push Openreach to update their fibre network, competition is normally a good thing.
I am glad that Openreach have competition and hopefully more people will go for the Alt nets.
The problem is, some people think that BT is a name to be trusted or they want to stay with the provider they have.
Both the altnets and Openreach-based fibre providers need to be more honest with end users.
E.g. according to Openreach’s fibre checker many premises are only given the vague forecast of being offered fibre somewhere before the end of 2026. That’s anything but a proper rollout plan.
Altnets aren’t much better either. Too many hide common issues such as only being able to provide CGNAT services (e.g. not suitable for even simple things like a CCTV, or hosting your own service, etc). Let alone being able to provide suitable rollout plans. For instance, in the East of England, companies like LightSpeed have misled many potential customers with vague promises like ‘We’re working on it!’ for almost 1 1/2 years now.
It’s time for the network industry to be more honest with end users. And for altnets to stop wasting investors’ money in areas already served by other fibre networks, thus ending up with lower than expected takeup rates and loosing ROI targets.
Half of uk? are you joking? I can name plenty of streets places without full fire broadband if half of uk has connected everything in London most of Wales would have it highly doubt that plenty of places without 4G 5G technology but you claim they have managed to cover half of uk this fast ballocks