Openreach Begins Main UK FTTP Broadband Build for Wokingham

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).

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.

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ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk) have now started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.