Openreach Name Top 10 Oxfordshire UK Areas for FTTP Broadband Cover
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today revealed the top locations for coverage of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in Oxfordshire (England), which sees the historic market town of Witney top the table with “nearly” 70% of all premises able to upgrade.
The operator claims to have so far invested more than £26 million to deploy their new network across Oxfordshire, which has already reached around 88,000 homes and businesses across the county. This works out at a per premises cost of roughly £295 and that’s in keeping with their current expectations. Build in the Oxford exchange area will start later this year.
Interestingly, Openreach also states that around 50% of all homes and businesses which have access to the new network in Oxfordshire have taken a service from a supporting ISP (e.g. BT, EE, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Zen Internet, iDNET, AAISP, Freeola and many.. more), which is well above their average UK FTTP take-up figure of c.34%.
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Openreach’s partnership director for the South East, Kasam Hussain, said: “Our amazing engineers and build partners have done a wonderful job to help us reach this significant milestone. This Full Fibre upgrade is a huge boost for the county and the wider region. We’re adopting a balanced build, bringing ultrafast speeds to the region’s biggest cities and towns as well as the most rural communities.”
The catch with Openreach’s top ten list below is that the operator hasn’t included any other coverage figures for each location, which is relevant because some places – like Longworth – may be in the top list, but they actually only have around 20% coverage. Suffice to say, there’s still a lot of build left to do and this doesn’t factor in the efforts of their many rival networks.
Top 10 Locations for Openreach FTTP in Oxfordshire (Exchange area):
Witney
Bicester
Banbury
Thame
Wantage
Blewbury
Childrey
Stratton Audley
Abingdon
Longworth
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.
There’s a reason why take-up is 50%, Oxfordshire is highly rural and unless you live right next to a VDSL cab the options previously available were very slow and unreliable.
Not correct. Where I live in Banbury we had very good VDSL and since FTTP went live 3 years ago take up has risen well above 50%. I suspect soon as the proportion of mature installations to new installations increases the 34% figure will start to rise. I am not pro or anti Openreach but this is just the reality of what I see on the ground.
Can’t help but think that the reason behind OR’s high take-up levels is nothing more than people can change technology without changing provider. The amount of customers who come through who didn’t have a clue anything was going to change is astonishing (and probably a 50/50 split between retail not doing their job properly and people ignoring any further communication).
Correct, Openreach have the advantage of having an existing base of copper customers to organically migrate, most I suspect are getting upgraded when recontracting.
Openreach customers are the ISPs, not the end user.
@The Facts, you are correct,, but also BT provisioning agent, who ever they are is correct as well.
Take my next door neighbour, they are on sky broadband, if they change to FTTP, not that I can see it happening for a while, but if they do, they are not going to change from Sky to say Zzoomm, they will stay with Sky, so will end up on the Openreach FTTP network. that will happen with a lot of people who are on FTTC, that is where openreach/BT has an advantage over Altnets.
Unfair advantage to be honest, but that what happens when a company is a monopoly for so long.
Meanwhile Oxford itself has some of the worst Broadband in the country. We’re lucky to get 10 Mbps via a flakey VDSL connection.
Trouble is building in these historic cities is very difficult and very expensive. I’m pretty sure that Openreach have been picking the lowest hanging fruit first before doing the more difficult (expensive) stuff
Is there something stopping an altnet just bunging up a lot of new poles and stringing fibre Dow the historic streets?
The powers that allow a provider to sling telegraph poles all over the place have limitations. So you can’t put them in a conservation area for example and the historic parts of Oxford are going to be all conservation areas so they can’t do that. You also can’t sling them up in the vicinity of listed buildings, which again covers large parts of Oxford.
I did a quick count of the longest street on our estate (168 properties) while out walking the other day, Openreach FTTP has been live for 3 years and 2 altnets have been live for about a year. 99 were on Openreach FTTP, 9 were on altnets and the rest obviously remaining on copper. So I would say well in line with the figures given.
You are as bad as me 🙂
I do that now and again, not that I can see all the splice boxes, as there are a set of bungalows that I think have the splice boxes either on the side or around the back.
In a small town not far away called Leominster, Openreach are not in some resident’s good books at the moment. Seems to happen a fair bit around there for some reason.
@ Big Dave, Older and present versions of Openreach internal splice trays, https://imgbb.com/bvVs6x5 https://i.imgur.com/bj2DJ69.jpg Some householders don’t want the CSP’s on the outside wall be it the older bigger version or the newer more compact grey CSP, or maybe it just suits the Openreach engineer on the day of the installation.
@Fibre Scriber
I wasn’t aware of the internal splice box. I know some properties have had the standard splice box fitted inside an attached garage, fortunately the street is on poles and drop wires so it’s fairy easy to pick them out.
Cries in Didcot
Except GWP!
OpenReach keeps changing the dates, they told me beginning of 2024 then end of 2024 to March/April 2025 now!! I hope they change it again.
Same for Netomia, they said they stopped in Didcot until they review the design, could be because they OR to do some work first
Except GWP!
OpenReach keeps changing the dates, they told me beginning of 2024 then end of 2024 and now it’s March/April 2025!! I hope they change it again.
Same for Netomia, they said they stopped in Didcot until they review the design, could be because they’re waiting for OR to do some work first
@ Big Dave, Some of the homes you counted may have internal Openreach splice trays, example of which can be viewed with this link, https://i.imgur.com/bj2DJ69.jpg usually mounted horizontally at the skirting board.
Currently on VM Gig1 w/ Volt. Really wanted to get FTTP before the contract renews next month but nothing for my street which is located in Wood Farm/Headington.
According to Netomnia there’s no available ducts for them to use so they’d have to use a pole, which they can’t or are struggling to get permission to do so by the power companies that own them.
Not sure how congested VMs ducts are but it would be ideal if they were forced or allow altnets to use them.
Its a bit of a joke when you consider that most of Oxford itself cannot get Openreach based fttp. Companies such as Netominia have realised this is really low hanging fruit so are building out like mad.
I find this hard to believe as a Wantage resident! Watched on bidb for weeks as a flurry of activity from Openreach happened and then dried up very quickly. Had a sign up early offer from Hey!Broadband but that was rescinded. I know of three other people that share my experience from different areas of Wantage to have it teased and then taken away for some distant timeline that has yet to be decided or announced. It just feels like they cover the easiest % of a town and then get the F out of there. I am still gutted that the properties within 15-20 meters from me have fibre
No idea why Wantage on this list as one of the top towns, about 20% (if that) is covered by openreach FTTP, nearly everything else is VM with some Hey Broadband (for ultra high speed that is), as a openreach broadband sponser for my estate, openreach weren’t interested and the date is Dec 2026 for ‘go live’ (date given back in 2022), they initially stated they needed a 65% take up, then dropped out after I had about 85 of the 109 properties interested
We decided to go to Hey Broadband (after being with BT vDSL for years) because of openreach’s refusal, signed up for their 24 months package @£29, 6 months free, some teething troubles to start with but now constant speed, sub-10ms ping and looks like their peering has sorted itself out
Openreach were out in 2022 laying infrastructure in the ducts, but not seen them since
Feel sorry for Luke above, we were one of the first lucky ones to get Hey Braodband in Wantage but like openreach, they seem to have left the area