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Openreach Begins Main UK FTTP Broadband Build for Wokingham

Monday, Oct 28th, 2024 (8:41 am) - Score 1,280
Openreach-UK-Engineer-Using-Apple-iPhone

Network operator Openreach (BT) has announced that they’ve started to deploy their 1.8Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across the Berkshire (England) town of Wokingham, although it’s unclear exactly how many premises will benefit, but it is “expected to reach the majority” of local premises.

The work, which is only expected to take around 6 months to reach the majority of homes and businesses, forms part of the operator’s wider deployment of full fibre connectivity, which has already covered nearly 16 million UK premises (inc. more than 175,000 properties in Berkshire alone). Openreach are currently investing up to £15bn to hit 25m by December 2026 (here), before reaching up to 30 million by 2030 (ambition).

NOTE: Civil engineering contractor Kier is helping to deliver the local build.

Openreach previously had a smaller FTTP deployment in the town, although the new roll-out will clearly be much more significant. The catch is that Wokingham already has significant gigabit broadband coverage from Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre), while CityFibre also covers more than half of the same area.

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In addition, several other alternative networks also have small patches of FTTP coverage inside the town, such as Hyperoptic and Trooli (Gigaclear also come very close, albeit mostly positioned directly outside the town).

Martin Williams, Openreach Partnership Director, said:

“We’re bringing ultrafast broadband to Wokingham and letting local people know what to expect. This is a major infrastructure upgrade, so there will be more engineering teams, equipment and vans around town, and we’re working hard to keep disruption to a minimum.

Wherever possible, we’ll use our existing network of ducts and poles to avoid roadworks, new street furniture and disturbance. But there may be places where we need to install new poles, underground ducts and fibre cables because it’s the only way to make sure households get included in the upgrade.”

The service itself, once live, can be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices) – it is not currently an automatic upgrade, although some ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk) have now started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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Comments
6 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo Some Edinburgh Guy says:

    Will be interesting to see if and when Openreach provide their next quarterly update for areas they are building in.

    1. Avatar photo No Name says:

      Same.

      We’ve been waiting since 2021 for the build to start. They said it would in 12 months. Then pushed pushed 4 times before finally going to 2026. My address has now gone from 2026 to not available.

      I love to know what’s going on. Not counting on any transparency though.

    2. Avatar photo Big Dave says:

      Q3 build update should be anytime now. It’s usually about a month after the end of the quarter.

    3. Avatar photo MikeP says:

      “What’s going on” is that they’re in the same boat as the altnets, but being so very much bigger, the car crash is slower.

    4. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      Take note that Openreach’s last build update largely completed their plan for getting to 25 million premises by Dec 2026:

      https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/05/openreach-name-517-new-uk-locations-for-fttp-broadband-rollout.html

      As a result, any future updates seem likely to be more of a re-organisation of existing plans, rather than a true expansion into lots of new areas/locations (though there may be some of this). This is because Openreach’s plan for getting from 25m to 30m will partly depend upon the outcome of Ofcom’s next market review, so we may have to wait a bit longer for the next truly major build update.

  2. Avatar photo Matt says:

    Come back and finish what you start !

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