BT Group Add Record 860,000 FTTP Broadband Premises to UK Coverage
The BT Group has published their latest H1 FY24 results to September 2023, which reveals that Openreach’s full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP network added a record of 860,000 premises to their coverage (up from 718k last quarter) and now covers 11.85 million premises, with a further 6m where initial build is underway.
Sadly, the provider’s retail divisions – including BT, EE and Plusnet – don’t publish full customer figures for their own ISP products, but they do report data for their “ultrafast broadband” (100Mbps+) plans and mobile service. The ISP stated that they had 2.08 million FTTP customers (up from 1.745m in FY23) and EE’s 5G connections now stand at 8.953 million (up from 7.774m). On top of that, the operator now reports that their consumers gobble an average of 389 GigaBytes (GB) of data per month (up from 364.6GB).
Overall, some 72.5% of BT’s fixed consumer base take a “superfast broadband” product (down from 75.5% in FY23) and 20.8% (up from 16.8%) have adopted one of their “ultrafast” products – including both G.fast and FTTP, which largely reflects FTTP cannibalising customers from slower packages. We also noted that 23% of BT’s customers are now taking both mobile and broadband (converged), which is up from 22.8%.
Financial Highlights – BT’s Half-Yearly Change
* BT Group revenue = £10,414m (up from £10,301m in H2 FY23)
* BT Group total reported net debt = £(19,689)m (increased from £(18,859)m)
* BT Group profit after tax = £844m (down from £1,012m)
We should add that EE’s 5G UK population coverage has now increased to 72%.
Openreach’s Network
The table below offers a breakdown of fixed line network coverage and take-up by technology on Openreach’s UK network, which covers the totals for all ISPs that take their products combined (e.g. BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Zen Internet, Vodafone etc.).
As usual, the rollout of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines continues to grow, with 860,000 premises being added in the quarter and that’s up from 718,000 last quarter. As for take-up, some 3.871 million FTTP broadband connections have been made on Openreach’s network (up from 3.123m), which equates to a take-up of 33% (up from 32% last quarter).
The rapid rollout of a new network almost always tends to suppress the take-up figure, thus Openreach continues to do extremely well to buck that trend – all despite an increasingly significant amount of competition from rival networks. This also goes to highlight the challenge AltNets are facing in peeling consumers away from the resident industry giant.
The other change worth noting above is that Openreach are no longer reporting any stats for their hybrid fibre G.fast network, which isn’t too surprising as they’ve been static since the roll-out was shelved several years ago. On the other hand, they do still report connection data for ADSL and VDSL (FTTC) but not G.fast, so perhaps they’re just embarrassed of it.
Openreach’s broadband ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) also grew by 10% year-on-year “due to price rises and increased volumes of FTTP“. But the operator suffered broadband line losses of 255k in H1, which is a 1% decline in the broadband base and they continue to target a decline of around 400k in FY24 – “softer market conditions increase the risk that losses will be above this level” (i.e. competition is putting pressure on them).
Philip Jansen, CEO of BT Group, said:
“These results show that BT Group is delivering and on target: we’re rapidly building and connecting customers to our next generation networks, we’re simplifying our products and services, and we’re now seeing predictable and consistent revenue and EBITDA growth.
We’ve strengthened our competitive position with the launch of both New EE and our renewed strategy in Business, and Openreach has now built full fibre broadband to more than a third of the UK’s homes and businesses with a growing connection rate. Our transformation programme has now delivered £2.5bn in annualised savings, well on track to meet our £3bn savings target by FY25.
Our delivery in the first half means we are confirming our financial outlook for FY24 with normalised free cash flow now expected towards the top end of the guidance range, and we are declaring an interim dividend of 2.31 pence per share. BT Group has a bright future and I’m pleased to be handing the baton to Allison Kirkby early in the new year. She knows the sector, she knows the company and she’s the right person to lead BT Group from this position of operational strength.”
Take note that BT now only publishes detailed results biannually for H1 and H2 (financial quarters), thus they release very little data for the other two quarters and that similarly means we will only be able to do two detailed reports every year instead of four.
Just a quick reminder. The previous set of results included a new metric, which predicted that their total labour force would shrink from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by 2030. The operator also predicted that Openreach’s FTTP coverage would grow to between 25-30 million premises and deliver take-up of between 40-55% by this same date. So far they’ve maintained their build cost envelope of £250-£350 per premises.
The latest report includes a quick progress update on this, which BT says shows they’re making “strong progress against these strategic metrics” (although “progress” is a word that might annoy those losing their jobs):
BT Group’s Targets – Progress
• Total labour resource decreased by 7k to 123k; target of 75-90k• FTTP premises passed increased by 1.6m to 11.9m; target of 25-30m
• Openreach take-up increased by 3 percentage points to 33% and retail take-up increased by 0.4m to 2.2m; targets of 40-
55% and 6.5-8.5m respectively• 5G UK population coverage increased to 72% and 5G retail connections increased by 1.3m to 9.9m; target of 13.0-14.5m
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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The 860k in a quarter brings this post to mind – https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/10/the-misery-of-diminishing-choice-in-g-fast-uk-broadband-areas.html#comment-293855
The take up number brings many posts by a regular here determined that hardly anyone wants FTTP to mind. To go from 30 to 33% take up while increasing coverage by about 7% is great going and way faster than people moved from ADSL to FTTC.
It will be few months before we really start seeing if the switch to Digital will also drive up FTTP take up, It is an obvious up selling opportunity
In other news this is really confusing:
‘The operator also predicted that Openreach’s FTTP coverage would grow to between 25-30 million premises and deliver take-up of between 40-55% by this same date – all whilst maintaining their build cost envelope of £250-£350 per premises.’
Openreach claimed the first 25 million was a £15 billion programme? If they can maintain that build cost envelope up to 30 million premises passed why is Project Gigabit a thing?
Some interesting counting involved somewhere in all this. They must be including some pretty specific stuff in the build cost and excluding a load of other things while including everything imaginable both capital and operational in the total programme number.
No that’s my error, as it only applies to build delivered so far (likely to cover most of the 25m though), although today’s results did add a semi-useful update on build costs:
“In the half, we have benefitted from unit build costs in our full fibre rollout in the lower half of our £250-£350 per premise range. Therefore, despite our accelerating rate of build, we are lowering our FY24 reported capital expenditure outlook to c.£5.0bn. This will flow through to our normalised cash flow for FY24, which we now expect to be toward the top end of our £1.0bn to £1.2bn range.“
Thank you, Mark!
More build volume and lower capex. This is a good thing for BT.
Losing 255k broadband connections in 6 months shows that altnets and 4G/5G are taking *some* people off the Openreach network, but not very many. Altnets are looking in an increasingly shaky position.
@NE555
“Altnets are looking in an increasingly shaky position”
I’m afraid yes they definitely are as can be seen as they react to the situation.
News just coming through of more redundancies at one of the biggest Altnets, Cityfibre. Less than 12 months since they made 20% of their employees redundant.
I assume it’ll be announced officially shortly.
it hasn’t stopped CF building in my area, even though OR FTTP and another altnet are already in place.
With virtually everyone on OR FTTP already (as evidenced by the grey boxes on walls) I doubt either altnet will be seeing too much of a return on their investments
Fortunately I saw this coming around again at CF and jumped ship rather than waiting to be pushed.
BT may be rolling out to lots of places but still zero FTTP from Openreach in my town. The Altnets are instead fighting between themselves (some roads now have 2 options, others have none – myself included!). I think we’ll see a lot of consolidation in the next few years and have 3 or 4 options (BT, VM, and one or two altnets) – just like the early days of cable. If they can keep the prices competitive they should stay relevant.
I just wish someone would hurry up and give my estate some FTTP… I’d love to stop watching bidb.uk/one.network ever hopeful my roads on the list!
@Cheesemp – I’m in the same boat. Zero FTTP in my city from Openreach. They are busy overbuilding alt-nets everywhere by the looks of it.
I wrote to the CEO and someone got in touch to confirm that they have ZERO plans for us, at least until 2026.
Strange they’re busy overbuilding altnets but aren’t overbuilding Giganet’s rollout where you are, Sonic.
Cuckoo Oak remains on G.fast (no FTTP) until 2026 or maybe never will be as Openreach think G.fast are good enough for 160/30 for most residential customers.
Other suppliers interested?
Few suppliers do!
hopefully Phil will be working out how to get his fellow namesake better broadband in his final months in office
though, don’t you already have an altnet?
‘Openreach think G.fast are good enough for 160/30 for most residential customers.’
Over 3 times as many homes can receive FTTP as G.fast. Build to 25 million isn’t half done yet. Nothing special about Cuckoo Oak for Openreach to prioritise it.
The BT 2026 date is just a default date and could be changed at any time and frequently is
It means little more than you do not have FTTP at present but will get it some time between now and 2026
G.fast stopped being shown as an option in my area and there is no FTTP from Openreach. So the fastest they offer me is 73Mb/s when it used to be 300.
Gfast is still an option but many suppliers don’t offer it anymore.
Sky offer it and TalkTalk seems to mostly offer it.
G.fast still offering – link here: https://www.filesanctuary.net/broadband/sogfast and few other smaller isps
OpenReach are still dragging their feet when it comes to upgrading of local exchanges and their disclosed timescales of ‘sometime in the future’ are not exactly helpful.
It’s hilarious that smaller outfits such as FibreHeroes and BeFibre have managed to roll out FTTP years before OpenReach are even predicted to upgrade our local exchange. It wouldn’t be so bad, but we are not exactly in the sticks in Chesterfield.
OpenReach should be ashamed and a lot more transparent.
I never biggest fan of Openreach since 25 years ago!
They can only do so much at one time, I doubt either of the altnets you mentioned have passed 860000 combined, let alone in one quarter…
Ashamed of what? Being the biggest and taking the most risks?
I always find it amusing that people measure the quality or coverage of internet/mobile service based on what they personally experience, rather than what the actual numbers say.
Openreach’s weekly rollout numbers dwarf the total rollout of some of these smaller players, and yet we’re supposed to believe the latter are the ones pushing UK internet access forward? lol, lmao
Should remind Phil that Openreach didn’t exist 25 years ago
That might be true where you are are but where I am Openreach went live more than 2 years ago but the altnet where I am (Swish) only started building at the start of the year and still nowhere near finished, in fact all we’ve have is rolls of Fibre optic cable strapped to the telegraph poles since April.
Openreach are the only operator to pretty much cover all of the UK. They only have so much resource in each area and so much finance and they can be supply issues as well. Slightly different skill sets are needed for underground and pole work as well as different equipment
Openreach presumably schedule the roll put based on market research and local knowledge of the network
@Peach: “They can only do so much at one time, I doubt either of the altnets you mentioned have passed 860000 combined, let alone in one quarter…”
I think the networks of FibreHeroes and BeFibre pass around 114,000 premises combined. Most of these altnets are of little threat to the big boys and are vulnerable to competition, inflation, interest rates, etc.
Always good to learn that lots more people now have Openreach FTTP available 🙂
As I understand it people take up a new or renew a contract with BT in areas have not been upgraded to FTTP are now but given SOGEA but also signed up to be automatically upgraded to FTTP when is deployed. This is what happened when a friend of mine dropped his landline and went to broadband only (SOGEA).
If this is what’s happening then it’s an automatic upgrade policy which I wasn’t aware was being done.
Think Broadband estimate the UK coverage of FTTP at 58%
4,306,415 premises (13.41% of the UK) an increase of 174,854 premises with two or more FTTP networks available
353,708 premises (1.10%) an increase of 48,872 premises with three or more FTTP networks available
13,038 premises (0.04%) an increase of 1,275 premises with four FTTP networks available
The Scottish Highlands and Islands have a very low level of FTTP and Harlow in Essex, which was one of the new town. Quite high density housing as well. Coverage there is just over 13%