BT Group See FTTP Broadband Cover 15.9 Million UK Premises as 5G Tops 80 Percent UPDATE
The BT Group has today published their latest biannual H1 FY25 results to Sept 2024, which reveals that Openreach’s UK full fibre (FTTP) broadband ISP network added 2.1 million premises to their coverage in H1 to cover 15.9m, while EE’s 5G mobile coverage increased to 80% of the population (up from 75% in H2 FY24). The fibre build rate has also been accelerated again.
The group’s consumer divisions – including BT, EE and Plusnet – reported being home to a total of 8.234 million broadband connections (down from 8.283m six months ago), which included 2.775m FTTP customers (up from 2,428m). On top of that, BT’s business divisions had 609,000 broadband connections (down from 641k) and 112,000 of those were FTTP lines (up from 94k). BT Wholesale also supplied a total of 691,000 broadband lines to other ISPs (up from 680k) and 82,000 of those were FTTP (up from 62k).
In terms of consumer mobile connections, EE reported total mobile customers of 13.875m (up from 13.859m), including 10.468m using 5G (up from 9.835m). On top of that, BT reported that their fixed broadband consumers gobbled an average of 436.5GB of data per month (up from 409.3GB), which falls to 16.7GB for EE’s post-paid mobile users (up from 16.5GB).
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Elsewhere, some 66.8% of BT’s fixed consumer base take a “superfast broadband” product (down from 69.8% in FY24 H2) and 28% (up from 24.4%) have adopted one of their “ultrafast” products – the latter includes both G.fast and FTTP, which these days largely reflects FTTP cannibalising customers from slower (FTTC and ADSL) packages.
ISPreview also noted that 23.1% of BT’s customers are now taking both mobile and broadband (converged), which is up from 22.9%.
Financial Highlights – BT’s Half-Yearly Change
* BT Group revenue = £10,138m (down from £10,421m in H2 FY24)
* BT Group total reported net debt = £(20,267)m (increased from £(19,479)m)
* BT Group profit after tax = £755m (up from £11m)
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.).
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As usual, the rollout of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines continues to grow, with 2.1 million premises being added in H1 and that’s up from 1.96m in the previous half. As for take-up, some 5.53 million FTTP broadband connections have been made on Openreach’s network (up from 4.7m in H2 FY24), which equates to a take-up of 35% (up from 34%).
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 alternative networks are facing, although they have managed to peel consumers away from the resident industry giant’s older network, with Openreach’s total broadband lines falling from 20.96m to 20.59m in the half (377k).
Openreach noted that they have increased their FY25 FTTP build target to 4.2 million premises “within our existing capex envelope driven by build cost efficiencies” and the operator claims to still be “on track to reach 25m by December 2026“. Finally, the network access provider highlighted how the growing take-up of FTTP has also contributed to a reduction in 12-month repair volumes of 0.3m to 3 million (fibre is a lot more reliable than copper), supporting growth in margin and EBITDA.
Allison Kirkby, CEO of BT Group, said:
“We have accelerated the modernisation of BT Group in the first half of the year. We’ve ramped up our full fibre build and connections, seen further improvements in customer satisfaction, and our cost transformation contributed to growth in EBITDA and normalised free cash flow despite revenue declines driven by our non-UK operations and a competitive retail environment.
Our nationwide full fibre rollout has set new records, now reaching more than 16 million premises, and we have further extended our industry-leading take-up rate to 35%. Our cost to build continues to reduce, enabling us to increase this year’s build target to 4.2 million with no additional capex spend. We also expanded our 5G network to cover 80% of the UK population, more than any other operator. These investments in the UK’s next generation networks are enabling much better experiences, reflected in our improved net promoter scores.
We are confirming our EBITDA, capex and cash flow guidance for FY25, albeit on lower revenue guidance. We remain firmly on track to meet our long-term cost savings and cash flow targets, and today announce an interim dividend of 2.40pps. The accelerated modernisation of our operations, combined with a focus on connecting the UK, puts us in a strong position to generate significant value for all our stakeholders.”
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 – like the one above – every year, instead of four.
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Just a quick reminder. BT introduced a new metric in 2023, 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 that same date. The latest report includes a quick progress update on this.
BT Group’s Progress Against Strategic Metrics:
• FTTP premises passed increased by 2.1m to 15.9m; target of 25-30m
• Openreach take-up increased to 35% and retail take-up increased by 0.4m to 3.0m; targets of 40-55% and 6.5-8.5m respectively
• 5G UK population coverage increased to 80% and 5G retail connections increased by 1.1m to 12.5m; targets of >98% and 13.0m-14.5m respectively
• Total labour resource decreased by 2k to 118k; target of 75-90k
In May 2024, BT also announced a further cost transformation target of £3bn gross annualised cost savings by the end of FY29 at a £1.0bn cost to achieve, after successfully delivering on a previous £3bn gross annualised cost savings target 12 months early. The operator said they are on track to deliver on this, with £0.4bn gross annualised cost savings achieved in H1 FY25 at a cost of achieve of £0.2bn.
UPDATE 3pm
The new Government’s decision to raise employers’ National Insurance (NI) contributions also looks set to hit BT for an extra £100m, which the operator has signalled will trigger a review of consumer pricing (i.e. expect larger price hikes), alongside efforts to cut costs in their supply chain and adopt more AI to find savings via automation.
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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In 6 months:
Premises passed by VDSL/FTTP +205k
Broadband lines -377k of which:
ADSL -205k
VDSL -964k
FTTP +832k
Total physical lines provided -572k
Well over 90% of BT Wholesale broadband services are provided to their own retailers.
Profits up. Maintenance costs coming down.
All as expected.
That’s a very narrow sighted view and the results are NOT as investors expected.
The share price today is down over 5%:
https://www.cityam.com/bt-challenging-conditions-hit-revenue-at-ftse-100-giant/
Yeah I didn’t say it matched BT’s or the market’s expectations. Altnets are impacting Openreach, Retail and Wholesale. The numbers match the trend I was given in a conversation I had recently.
Plenty of customer loss across Openreach, Consumer and in turn Wholesale/Enterprise to go before the new equilibrium is found. Switching becoming easier really isn’t going to help them or really any of the biggest ISPs either but great for us as customers.
Consumer can’t compete even with a Sky, TalkTalk or Vodafone as they may use other networks where available, they’re by a mile the biggest customer of Wholesale so they take a hit and Wholesale area the biggest customer of Openreach. That ignoring altnets winning business straight from Consumer onto their own networks.
I imagine the Enterprise / Global issues were a much bigger deal than the broadband ones for investors. The broadband numbers are predictable: just have to keep on eye on altnet announcements and deals big Openreach customers are striking.
With their legacy GPON product operating in asymmetric mode…….
GPON is by definition asymmetric. 2.4Gbps down, 1.2 up.
The results say – once again – that most people don’t care about symmetric speeds or using bleeding edge PON standards, and when they do Openreach will provide it.
In interests of transparency: other forward thinking ALTNETS are available with symmetric speeds right now – no need to wait forever with BT trials and roll out programmes 🙂
Loving the new username Ivor, becoming a trademark 😉
the alt nets are no where near the availabilty of openreach full fibre. most just want working and reliable broadband/full fibre and dont really care of its symetrical or not. competition is good to keep everyone on there toes
Oh, those silly names again. Superfast, ultrafast, fibre, real fibre, part fibre. If only we’d used realistic and sensible naming from the start! Here, I’m just watching BIDB to see whether Openscreech or CityFibre gets here first. Lots of vans in the area these days, but I’m not getting hopeful yet… #fibredesert
I’m not sure if I missed it among all the jargon, but was there any info on 5G Home Broadband usage via 5G routers?
When I renewed my BT package in August of this year, I was advised that I would be automatically upgraded to FTTP once it became available in my area. This policy of automatic upgrade will now no doubt help accelerate the FTTP adopt metric.
My mate has just been upgraded likewise, once it becomes available expect to receive an email from them offering the upgrade.
@Big Dave:
Thanks, however, the invite will not arrive anytime soon because the area is yet to be scheduled for FTTP roll-out. The area seems to be well down the list due to it being a conservation area and due to an incumbent alt-net fibre network already in place.
Why were you surprised? FTTP cut costs, so they are going to push people onto it. My brother is with Talk Talk and gets emails about going onto FTTP all the time. One of them was saying that he would be upgraded to FTTP and said to make an appointment. He has not replied or phoned them. So I presume until he does, they can’t do anything.
they are going to push and push to get people onto FTTP, that is why I left plusnet because they pushed me to go onto FTTP and I did not want to go onto FTTP. But since they were pushing, I thought I may as well go to a network that was better. If I did not have an altnet here, I would have gone with Now broadband FTTC, I expect. I had no interest in changing to FTTP and still not bothered. While I am now on FTTP, having 500Mb.s don’t make much difference to when i was on 36Mb/s
No mention of their BT/EE TV service in the report as far as I can see (apart from the Joint Venture with WBD for TNT Sports). Since they are now reselling Sky Stream I suspect sooner or later they will drop their own TV service. The City didn’t appear to be too impressed, their share price was down 7% today.
15.9 million premises passed for FTTP, that must be surely close to 50% UK coverage? A milestone to celebrate?
think broadband have posted 32.6m premises, so yes very close to 50%, as u say
Just under 32.4m according to BIDB figures, so yeah not far off 50% coverage.
Now actually at 16.2 million so even closer to 50%
I am currently with BT Business, but they have suggested I look for another provider as they can’t renew my contract. (I am a copper customer due to being in a fibre not spot in an urban area and not included in project gigabit plans, not altnet or Openreach- both the latter choosing not to upgrade my street) mobile signal not strong enough for 4G/5G broadband either)
Is BT slowly removing itself from the copper market and does that leave users like myself having to either move or look at starlink?
Can you rely on BT’s USO?
To clarify- they won’t let me take out a new contract, but I am still connected on a 40/10 service. Obviously the out of contract price is significantly higher than being under contract.
They have advised I look elsewhere. If BT are stopping offering contracts on copper only lines, will other ISPs follow?
Does this mean that I need to consider starlink as my only option? Currently this is too expensive but will the huge annual increases, soon make starlink the only viable option.
so you’re actually on “fibre” (no need for the arguments, that’s what everyone calls VDSL, end of story). “Copper” in BT-speak means ADSL and I could see why they’d want users off of it where possible. They’ve stopped selling ADSL where VDSL/FTTP exist though.
But for VDSL I am aware of BT dumping any such customers, they’ll still happily sell it if that’s all that’s available.
If BT Business no longer want to sell that product you can still get it from any other ISP who use Ooenreach’s network. Even BT Retail / EE.
Is it possible you are on an old ISDN line that’s being retired?
I’m entering my correct URPN on the by wholesale BB checker and it keeps saying
“We are sorry but the checker is unavailable at the moment. Please try again later.”
Is it just me?
My fathers neighbours are now looking to move to StarNet as BT has not informed them when they will get fibre (unlike my father – just 250mtrs up the road as the most distance property in an isolated group of 5). The AltNet in the village is just cherry picking the easy pickings – any property difficult to connect up they are ignoring.
I just hope BT doesn’t end up only connecting the difficult to access properties.
25-30m by 2030 seems a bit revised, and not unexpected.
81000 premises per week, more that the total footprint of many altnets who specialise in Fibre to the Press!