Openreach Reveal UK Plan for Symmetric 1Gbps FTTP Broadband UPDATE
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has just announced that they’re planning to launch their first symmetric 1Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP packages, albeit initially only in “certain locations” from April 2025. Some of the first premises to benefit will be those covered by their rural Project Gigabit contracts (here).
Openreach’s full fibre network has so far covered 15 million premises (there are around 32.5m across the UK), but they aim to reach 25 million by December 2026 and have also expressed an ambition to reach “up to” 30 million by 2030. But the fastest FTTP package currently available to consumers on this network gives a top download speed of 1.8Gbps and 120Mbps upload (220Mbps for businesses).
One of the reasons why Openreach hasn’t yet offered anything faster, including true symmetric speeds (i.e. the same download and upload rate), stems from their use of a Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) – this places limitations on how fast they can go before capacity becomes an issue.
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For example, GPON supports a capacity on each trunk line of up to 2.5Gbps downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream, which needs to be shared between several premises. By comparison, many of their competitors are already busy deploying 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for symmetric speed), which is a significantly faster, more cost-effective and power efficient technology.
However, at the end of 2023 the then boss of strategic supplier ADTRAN revealed (here) that Openreach were adopting a ComboPON approach, which would make it easier for them to upgrade without needing to change all of the existing optical modems (ONTs) inside homes that they’ve deployed via GPON (e.g. they’ll be able to use either GPON or XGS-PON based ONTs, whatever the situation requires). But there was no sign of faster packages, until today.
Matthew Sledge, Openreach Product Manager, said:
“Last year we successfully launched to Communication Providers (CPs) new download speeds of up to 1.8Gbps over our Full Fibre network and we’re keen to continue pushing the capabilities of the network so we can further diversify our portfolio and offer our CP customers, and their own end customers a broader choice of competitive fibre based products.
At the current time we are focusing the new product on a deployment in selected Project Gigabit Type C areas, where we can assess demand and usage.
With broadband data usage growing year on year, we’re also planning for the future, and have recently engaged our Communications Provider customers on the next phase of Full Fibre network architecture, e.g. XGS-PON. We are seeking their feedback on what end customers future speed requirements might look like.”
Openreach aren’t yet ready to offer any further details, except to confirm that any end customers signing up to the new 1Gbps symmetric service will be able to use their existing ONT. Otherwise, the related pricing and commercial terms for the new product(s) “will be confirmed in due course“.
We’re currently trying to confirm this, but we suspect that the first products will form part of a trial / pilot in the aforementioned Project Gigabit build areas. This is because it would be very unusual for an operator of Openreach’s size to skip right to a full commercial launch, especially one with only limited availability. Pilots like this can last anything from 3 months to a couple of years.
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The Project Gigabit Type C (Cross-Regional) contracts – worth up to £800m – for that build could eventually see Openreach expanding out to reach an additional 312,000 premises in hard-to-reach UK rural areas, with the first premises under these due to gain access to gigabit-capable broadband in “early 2025“. This closely aligns to their April 2025 date for the symmetric speed service.
Once deployed, we may see faster speeds than 1Gbps symmetric (or even 1.8Gbps asymmetric) become available in the future, although not every part of their network is currently ready to support symmetric performance. But that’s before we consider that it may take ISPs and wholesale suppliers (e.g. BTWholesale, TalkTalk, Zen Internet etc.) time to adapt to such products and the higher capacity demands involved.
UPDATE 2:18pm
Openreach has informed ISPreview that they’ll be “going straight to launch in April” because, they say, there aren’t any commercial or technical reasons to start it with a trial/pilot. But they did suggest that they’d probably still be monitoring the first few orders to checks speeds up/down etc. In addition, this should still be taken within the context of its limited initial availability.
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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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Hell has frozen over, and I think I just spotted a squadron of pigs flying…
But, the rub, of course “certain locations”
“Certain locations” – That would always be the case, but I can imagine this would be rolled out pretty quickly after the initial ‘certain locations’ are successfully completed.
Certain Locations, normally means Kesgrave in Ipswich, and surrounding areas in the shadow of Adastral Park
do You really think they would turn on 15 million connections all on the same day.
can you imagine the chaos that would ensue
Did NOT see this one coming but…. “The devil is in the details”.
How much? Where? When?
I look forward to more information but definitely an exciting development 😀
Oh yeah, no doubt there will be an extra cost to it. I presume that the ONTs being installed at the moment can’t cope with XGS-PON? so yes, there will a extra charge
@Ad47uk, the article says that the original ONTs can be used.
End-users can be given symmetrical speeds over GPON, although of course there’s a 1.2Gb/s upload cap.
@ Will, I have read it again, and you are correct., My eyes were a bit blurry when i read it the first time :). I thought Openreach used Nokia ONT, not sure where I got that from.
What is the reason behind Openreach adopting an inferior and less cost-effective technology in the first place?
It is cheaper.
It doesn’t have anything to do with that, it simply was a more “mature” technology (GPON was standardised first in 1997…) and more cost-effective actually on their side (i.e. cheaper). I hope it will be coming to London, it would be nice to have another option (I’m on CommFibre now, option of VM XGS and Hyperoptic).
Sorry was looking at the wrong RFC, GPON is 2003.
The reason is that it is BT/openreach, they are normally behind, look along it have taken to get Fibre in this country in the first place, also ADSL took much longer than it should have.
Other countries have had fibre years before us. Once again, backwards U.K. Seems to be the norm for this country, only have to look at our train service.
ADSL was delayed because Oftel (as they were called at the time) got involved as they were concerned about the competition implications if BT could sell you broadband and nobody else could. They still launched nearly a year ahead of NTL’s cable modem service.
You seem to want things to happen at the speeds that can only happen when no regulators are involved, but you want all the outcomes of the regulation, obviously you can’t have that.
Presumably they started first, before the altnets, and started with the best available tech at the time? XGS-PON only came more recently, and even CityFibre wasn’t using it initially. Of course, the whole shebang started far too late, compared with other countries, but perhaps there’s an advantage if we end up with more XGS-PON at the outset. Who knows, I’m only speculating at this point, as I don’t know what’s happening in other countries now.
@Ad47uk very true, most countries in Europe had FTTP to most properties by the time FTTC was becoming the norm over here…
A bit of it is because GPON was the technology in use at the time the huge contracts were signed to procure the equipment, but also there’s no point eating up XGS-PON ports and installing ONTs that cost 3-5x the price when customers are signing up to a 150Mbps package. XGS-PON and GPON exist on the same glass without any issues, there’s nothing wrong with defaulting to GPON and then doing an ONT swap when someone subscribes to a higher value service that requires it.
Please don’t look at a company that lost £210m last financial year and declare that’s the way a company that isn’t paid for by a wealth fund should operate. CityFibre are doing good things but they can make decisions differently due to their funding model. Even then they were GPON until recently.
When compared to Germany in real terms we have far better fibre coverage overall, they still use VDSL2 in a lot of places with no plans to upgrade their infrastructure so far
@Jonny, I suppose it would take time for ISPs those days to set up a broadband service, so I kind of agree with the reason it was delayed, but even so, we are still way behind other countries.
Thankfully we are catching up, but I think a lot of that is to do with the altnets as I am pretty sure Openreach would have dragged their feet even more if they had no competition.
I think we should have a fibre network owned and run by a not for profit government department and all providers should use that, but sadly that will never happen.
They wanted a reliable technology for such a big build project.
you dont want to build 30 million properties on a newer technology from the get go.
(same reason VMo2 are not upgrading existing hfc to xgpon but firstly to rfog)
so exactly as predicted then. Their customers (the ISPs) want it, so Openreach is now getting on with it. I await the complaints about “endless trials”!
Meanwhile their 1.8Gbps GPON asymmetric product is widely available and pacifies the vast majority of users, without the endless wait for an upgrade to XGSPON equipment as some altnets are insisting upon.
It’s as if Openreach know actually know what they’re doing and have come up with an approach that suits a major network operator, rather than an altnet whose total addressable customer base is a week or two of OR build out and uses (nominally) higher speeds to generate PR.
Nothing to do with customers wanting, it is everything to do with other networks doing it, so Openreach need to update to catch up with the others. While most people will have little use for 1Gb download, never mind upload, there are some people who will find that speed useful. the sad part is that people will stick with the ISP/network they know and not look elsewhere. this is why Openreach keeps getting more customers, nothing to do with what the network is like,
Saw this, and immediately scrolled to see if BT Ivor had posted. He had!
Well, BT doing this because quite frankly, it’s shocking they are still deploying GPON when the world has moved on, and they want to kill ALTNETS off as much as possible.
Now, given that Ivor and some others have been so public in saying nobody wants symmetric, I can’t help but wonder if the egg splattered everywhere when it hit 🙂
Finally, and slow as usual, BT may be catching up for most people but ALTNETS have advantage of being cheaper for a number of them, and faster speeds for those that want it.
could say the same about “anonymous” posting insisting that openreach are dinosaurs etc etc.
what I actually said was that the mass market doesn’t need symmetric speeds, and that is why Openreach have not rushed to bring this out, because ISPs didn’t want it. There is no inconsistency.
Given that the article suggests that only the 1Gbps is going symmetric, my point still holds – it seems like this will be a premium option for those *with an actual need for higher upload speeds*, eg home worker/SMB services.
The altnet fanatics will have to find a new angle. Openreach’s market leading take up rate and financial performance continues to outstrip any of them – and now they offer what (according to said fanatics) everyone was calling out for. I look forward to 100% takeup! lol
It’s good they are catching up but it’s still 8 months until this launches in a limited way. It’s probably going to be 2 to 3 years by the time it’s widely available. In that time the market could look very different.
@Ivor, But openreach are dinosaurs, the only reason they are updating is that they have little choice, either because the equipment they are using is falling apart and getting expensive to fix or competition.
Openreach should have been separated from BT years ago, not the false pretence separation we have now. Better still, it should have put under government ownership
.
This is using existing equipment. Nothing do with XGSPON.
A good question is, if people on the 1.8gbps plan can get the same upload too?
More likely 1Gbps / 1Gbps product only!
In due course symmetric 1.8Gbps could indeed be offered but only in areas which are enabled for XGS-PON. This will require, amongst other things, the ADTRAN ComboPON referred to in the article to be installed in the OLT. At the customer end a replacement ONT will be required.
@Roger_Gooner
Both Nokia and Adtran have been supplying combo pon 2.5gbits/10gbits to Openreach for sometime now. Given the size of OR providing 10gbit pon to the customer isn’t the issue, its to isp customers, some are on smaller links which don’t have the capacity.Its also provisioning too, do you put customers on 2.5gbit pon or 10gbit pon, can they be dynamically switch – how will it work on the auth side, etc etc.
Nokia can do 2.5/10/25 combo pon with their units, i’m not sure if Adtran can.
No need for Adtran OLTs for XGSPON and make no sense replacing working Nokia and Huawei OLTs with Adtran.
Point is to use Adtran and Nokia combo optics for new build. Older Adtran chassis can’t take combo optics, Nokia needs combo line cards.
Openreach XGSPON will be mix Adtran and Nokia with GPON mix combo, older Adtran, maybe some older Nokia and Huawei.
Taras Openreach don’t supply many CPs. Most of the smaller ISPs buy from a wholesaler who buys from Openreach. A link to an Openreach OLT is a pair of lit fibres. A 10 Gbit link to an Openreach OLT can connect to a switch and optic costing less than £150. The cost is getting that out of the exchange and onto your own network.
Customer can’t go between GPON and XGSPON randomly, needs a different ONT. The ONT is authenticated not the customer.
Adtran have no 25GPON products at the moment.
One million premises a quarter does sound promising. Hopefully they will reach our big urban fibre desert soon, although I wish they were more transparent on rollout plans. I get over-excited whenever I see an Openreach van these days (how sad is that). I’d be very happy on the basic 115/20Mbps FTTP service, for now, as it’ll still be much cheaper and faster than the current VDSL (on the same ISP).
You can get 1100 down, 100 up. You say you’ll be happy with 115 down, 20 up. You say FTTC is doing the job. You constantly post on here on every story even slightly related complaining about your urban fibre desert.
Are you ok? Sounds like you’re just upset that other people can get something you can’t when you don’t even want the benefits it provides you just think you’re entitled.
My answer to “when will Openreach do symmetric FTTP” was always “when their customers (the CPs) demand it” and that’s been borne out. I am also confident there’s a healthy enough Ethernet market that a basic broadband service won’t cut into it outside of some edge cases.
A long time coming, let’s just hope they deliver! Now, let’s see if the other AltNets will follow suit (yes, I’m talking about you Airband!)
Nice to see them playing catchup to Cityfibre, absolutely no reason they couldn’t have done it from the first place
City fibre have 3 million potential customers to service
Openreach currently have 15 million
Providing a stable good product is much more important than trying to supply 10gig connections to compete with a tiny provider that get you lots of bad press due to major outages
good news really.
And yet all I can get 2mb, they should put a stop on all upgrades until they finish FTTC. There are about 40% of they country that don’t even get 10mb.
@Ricky then they can request a better service via the USO. The small number of USO requests suggests that most of the country actually gets speeds above 10Mb/s.
@Ricky – UK FTTP (full fibre) coverage has reached 68.8%. Where do you get 40% < 10M from?
That’s not true Ricky.
@ricky
where are u getting 40% from, theres around 32million properties so 12.8m properties are less than 10mb! the actual figure is around 250,000 in the uk that get less than 10mb
@ the facts
and gigabit is 84% ie thats with virgin docsis etc
@Ricky, you still on ADSL? wow, sorry to hear that. Have you thought about mobile networks? I know someone who was on dial up until a couple of years ago, and I set them up with a mobile network using Three. It was only possible when the mast was moved, and they could get a better signal. They get about 25Mb/s give or take, but it is certainly better than dial up and your ADSL. The other thing is, they can do a pay as you use if they want to, as they don’t use it that much.
Ricky, buy Starlink. 300Mbps awaits.
@Ben.
The trouble with the USO, is that the customer still has to foot a large part of the bill to install it. A friend of ours has 4Mb on a good day as the whole road is direct buried and they were quoted several thousand pounds to get it upgraded, and that was after any OR subsidy!
Reality?
Openreach and Nokia already proved GPON and XGS-PON over the same fibre in 2021 which gives the basis for their overlay.
The majority of consumers will be happy with the modest speed asymmetric products.
Openreach uses more than one supplier for their supply simply due to their demand (15m premises so far)
Openreach has begun utilising supplier variations such as Adtran to enable upgradable OLTs rather than the overlay.
Openreach, if not already in some locations, will be switching to XPS-PON when the price/supply point is met.
ONT’s like the little Nokia are already in various speed variants with the latest more than capable.
Only smaller percentages of their total lines will be the higher speed asymmetric or one Gig symmetrical and more likely to be focused on SME options for ISPs.
Piloting is what big companies need to do and press releases help the shares.
Makes perfect sense to me to not upgrade the exchange until a customer orders the product. Means they can continue using much cheaper GPON equipment whilever its more profitable to do so.
Pretty sure in one of the exchange tours they showed that the fibre has a combiner on every PON already, so they wont need to disconnect the PON to add XG-PON.
I bet 1Gbps down and 1Gbps up from Openreach will cost more expensive probably around £115 to £125 per month
What? How? You can’t just make up random numbers and say that’s the cost?
But that’s how BT / OpenReach set their prices.
LOL, as much as I hate Openreach, even they would not charge that much, they will lose customers in droves. But no doubt they will charge extra, which is fine, because hopefully people who need it and if they can, will go to an alternative network. Openreach could have given people Symmetric on FTTC, but they choose not to.
Openreach out of date.
Ad47uk
You can’t get symmetrical for fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) never is and never will. The same with G.fast. You only getting symmetrical for Full Fibre Optic only.
Actually it’ll do symmetrical fine. Both VDSL and G.fast. It just means giving up download speed in return for more upload which doesn’t make sense for home use.
If Openreach are happy to provide 1.8Gps over a 2.4Gps, which is 75% of GPON capacity to one person, then how can they argue they are worried about congestion on the upload if going higher than around 100Mbps person? The same ratio applied to upload as to download is around 930Mbps to one person as an upload speed.
We know this is about protecting their more profitable leased line services, but they realise they are losing ground to other suppliers so need some good PR for their shareholders, and this is it. A limited trial that will take years to complete.
I don’t think this is about protecting ethernet at this point, there’s no point acting like a symmetric gig is anything special that you have to try and squeeze a couple hundred a month out of someone for until CityFibre move in and take your customer away, I think the ship has sailed on that. All the new Ethernet we have been doing has been 10Gb bearers or resilient path stuff with full documentation of fibre routes.
Literally says it’s not going to trial in the article so stop making stuff up.
The worry on contention is simple. It’s a lot easier to max out a gig upload 24x7x365 than download.
Very cool
I won’t hold my breath that my 3mbps down/400kbps up broadband will improve any time soon
Very unlucky to be a <1%er? The tables suggest that only 0.8% of premises can't get 10Mbps these days. I'm still in an urban fibre desert but I can get VM and FTTC at 67/20Mbps, which does the job for now.
This is good news.. Finally symmetric services might become a reality in the not too distant future.
Symmetric fttp is nice serval have been doing it now I’m enjoying my symmetrical 2gbit
Nice! But as a 150 MBS user when will I see parity! If it’s only 1 speed and not all speeds, everyone else will be second class citizens!
Come on Netomnia give me PARITY!
You are seriously complaining you won’t have symmetrical from Openreach because you don’t want to pay for it and expect an altnet to spend hundreds getting to you for the cheapest, slowest service they have?
I guess you expect them to buy out your contract as well? Maybe some cash back? Pay off your mortgage?
No money for anyone in chasing the Money Saving Expert customers.
From the various articles, I gather this will initially be available to Cross-Regional (Type C) locations? If that’s the case it could be Openreach are doing this because it makes good business sense.
I have no idea which OLT’s Openreach are using in the exchanges, but to connect XGS-PON in parallel with GPON probably needs nothing more than an optical splitter connection, or using an existing expansion port on the GPON OLT card if available and then replacing any customer ONT’s as required, so a relatively easy upgrade.
If the Type C locations are using Subtended Head Ends, then additional hardware upgrade’s may be difficult, so it makes sense to go straight in at the start with XGS-PON so any future service upgrade’s are software programmable.
guessing u missed the update ( see below ) 3 hours or so before ur post –
UPDATE 2:18pm
Openreach has informed ISPreview that they’ll be “going straight to launch in April” because, they say, there aren’t any commercial or technical reasons to start it with a trial/pilot. But they did suggest that they’d probably still be monitoring the first few orders to checks speeds up/down etc. In addition, this should still be taken within the context of its limited initial availability.
I saw the update, but how does that change what I said. The articles all clearly state that the new service will be available in Type C areas, this article says “At the current time we are focusing the new product on a deployment in selected Project Gigabit Type C areas, where we can assess demand and usage”.
I suggested that they may be using XGS-PON in subtended Head End equipment’s, how does the update contradict that?
This is using GPON. Most type C prems will be on existing OLTs. They’re type C because getting to the individual prems is expensive not availability of spine fibre or OLT ports.
The article says ‘Openreach aren’t yet ready to offer any further details, except to confirm that any end customers signing up to the new 1Gbps symmetric service will be able to use their existing ONT.’
It also says no need for pilot or trial. Don’t you think the first XGSPON commercial roll out would be piloted first?
How does that work then? Most of the content I’ve read describes GPON as asymmetric, although I have read that newer standards allow for 2.4 Gb/s upload and download, but the configuration is apparently rare. Are you saying the current Openreach GPON OLT/ONT hardware are capable of supporting the newer symmetric standard? I believe Openreach use a lowish split ratio of 1:32, maybe that helps if you’re correct.
The product is symmetrical gigabit. GPON is quite capable. 30-odd prems on GPON is the normal split and works pretty well.
Some contention can happen but that’s normal.
Positive move for Openreach, especially with the apparent lack of trial/pilot requirement.
I wonder if more ISPs will transition away from PPPoE to better support Gig+ bandwidths without the encapsulation processing overhead that becomes more apparent at higher bandwidths.
PPPoE encapsulation is not that big of a deal on proper equipment – including ISP provided CPE that actually uses the hardware acceleration features in the SoC. Of course the big iron at the ISP end also has no issue at all doing it for thousands of customers simultaneously.
It may however be a problem for those who have “self provided”, to put it politely.
this has become apparent in other countries, eg the major Canadian telcos who do multi gig symmetric FTTP with PPPoE. The sub-$100 ISP device works fine, while the usual third party options might not (and it gets worse if you try to apply other features on top)
That is something I did not know, in that PPPoE made a difference as you get higher speeds. I wonder if that is why my ISP don’t use it?
I thought all PPPoE did was sign you in sort of thing. I suppose should have learnt about it, but really had no reason to.
Mmm, read, I must at some point.
Too late to the party. Only select areas, only 1gbps and only in April.
Nexfibre will give them a real challenge.
Don’t forget the city fiber too
Considering most people go for 160/30 and 550/50 for the OR installs I do on a daily basis that really doesn’t seem the case.
See 115/15 all the time too for Voda.
If everyone was so obsessed with speed like most on here make out it’d be 1000 and 1800 packages constantly but it literally never is in reality.
Purely out of interest, those that are interested in having a symmetrical connection, what would you use that extra upload bandwidth for?
Cloud backups would be a common one.
I hear it’s also indispensable for video creators.
Nothing, some people on here think symmetrical would be useful but they will never come close to using that bandwidth..
I sit next to a colleague who works on IPP BTNET customers, most pay for 10G symmetrical.
Showed me on HYDRA that they hardly go over 50meg..
So it’s just a gimmick and publicity stunt
For me, I work with video and I have to upload terrabyte sized videos for clients. Symmetric, or even something better than 120mbit would be a godsend. Presuming of course the place i’m uploading to could handle it. But I’ve only recently just got FTTP and 120mbit was a heck of a lot better than the 14mbit upload I had with DSL
In my case, mainly doing backups between my house and my parents, remote access to data and hosting my own VPN (wireguard/tailscale).
Hardly anyone pays for symmetrical 10G for anything other than their data centre. ‘Most’ is not accurate.
Off site backups and cloud services like OneDrive that are used. Two or more people using OneDrive and its useful to have extra bandwidth rather than clog up machine doing slow sync. Any videos taken on phone or with video camera can be uploaded more quickly.
With symmetric, running a server for family use is also a possibility.
Tyler, just because your brain can’t comprehend WHY some people would like symmetric then please don’t try to speak for everyone. Sometimes saying nothing is more intelligent.
People do not always use 100% of their download bandwidth at any speed ALL of the time, it doesn’t mean faster speeds should not be offered. When you want to download some big files for example, most would want them as quick as possible and not wait around. A decent car can go fast, but you don’t use it’s speed all of the time or even the car – yet people buy them.
People may want to run home servers, VPN in and out of their network, and so many other uses. This is why some want faster upload capability. Circa 100mbps is paltry for some and when ALTNETS have been doing it, its NOT shiny and new from BT.
On my CF 1000/1000 connection I am now automating various uploads to cloud backup. I considered it not viable even when I had 100mbit upload.
hahah leased line commenters? where are you friends?
You still can’t compare a dedicated circuit to a PON-based line (latency, overheads, reliability, etc), but I agree that the differences are getting a bit more subtle 🙂
He’s busy over here. https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/fibre/t/4760484-is-this-fibre-being-deployed.html
Wow. I’d be over the moon to even get their regular symmetrical fibre here in Andover. Our road seems to have been abandoned
Still stuck on dsl. Virgin only connected half the houses on my street. Still no fttp from open reach.
The UKs’ infrastructure is terrible. When you travel to other countries its telly an eye opener.
That is strange why they do half and not the other half, you would have thought it would be easy to carry on. We don’t have Virgin here, but I chat to people who live in Virgin areas and they say the same thing, their die of the road may have virgin and the other side don’t, or Vice versa.
Thankfully, Zzoomm does the whole road.
That could have been done 30 years ago by a cableco which had only enough money to do one side of the road. Let’s face it, the history of the cable industry is full of under-financed companies.
When Openreach has finished removing all the slower (currently lower cost – even though fibre is cheaper than copper(er? what?)) there will be no option for those not needing the high speeds. People who only need good communication will be forced into the higher costs of superfast whatever.
I want to stop paying BT their 73 pounds every month – and that for BT’s pretend full fibre (fibre to the CABINET) marketing hype. I just want my emails and regular updates to my systems. I don’t need superfast jelly-babies. BT goodbye.
5G ? I certainly agree that the UK infrastructure is rubbish. The previous government didn’t have a clue how to organise anything.
BT charge new customers significantly less than £73 per month (for part fibre or full fibre) — suggest you see if they can offer you a similar deal.
So this appears to be using existing gpon ONT’s in type C areas. Could this be in more rural areas where the gpon upload won’t be saturated so they can offer a 1gbps up and down service?
The first set of type C contracts were only just announced, so “existing ONTs” seems unlikely
Are you saying all the type C contracts, small amounts of prems scattered all over the place, will be using their own OLTs instead of available ports on whatever is serving the local area?
Rural areas continue to lead the way with OR.
Sigh…
More certain areas, so annoying.
I’m rural, True speed did half the village, they are not coming back.
BT/OR not interested, because Truespeed have done the village.
I get a 10mb copper connection.
There’s a school just up the road, they have just had a new fibre connection installed, two houses on the same street got on that circuit, no more availablity for the rest of us.
Infuriating would be an understatement.
Not such a surprise. Adtran’s Ronan Kelly revealed to Richard Tang 8 months ago that Openreach were evaluating their combi GPON/XGSPON gear here:-
https://youtu.be/cTIV3iTyKlE?feature=shared
I assume that new build areas will be getting the upgrade from the start. By the time Openreach build here Community Fibre will probably have got their act together
I’d be happier about this if they hadn’t delayed FTTP and symmetrical speeds as long as they have. It is good news though, finally, although to late for me, after 20 years as a customer and 14 years on FTTC I jumped ship to Cityfibre in January and downgrading to gigabit is not something I’d be interested in. Symmetrical 5 Gb might tempt me back.
What is the likelihood this will be available in Scotland in R100 rollout areas?
R100 is a separate contract, but some of the cross-regional Project Gigabit contracts that Openreach are expected to scoop do cover parts of Scotland.
mark, do we have an update on which locations they will do and if so why certain locations?