Openreach Name Top 5 London Boroughs for Full Fibre Broadband Cover
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today revealed the top five London Boroughs for coverage of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which sees Barking and Dagenham topping the table with more than 8 out of 10 premises now able to upgrade to the new service.
The boroughs of Bexley, Redbridge, Hillingdon and Merton then round off the remaining top five slots, although Openreach hasn’t provided any coverage figures for those. The network operator’s new full fibre network is currently available to more than 1.5 million homes and businesses across London. But London is home to around 3.8 million dwellings and Openreach’s coverage is thus somewhere around 40%, which could be better.
Elaine Hope, Openreach’s Partnership Director for London, said: “This Full Fibre upgrade is a huge boost for London. Better connectivity helps communities thrive and supports people to work from home easily, keep in touch with their loved ones and build connections and opportunities. And we’re not stopping yet; our investment across the city continues at pace with build continuing at forty locations across Greater London”.
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The new service, 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ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk) have started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.
The 40 locations in London where Openreach are currently building
Albert Dock
Bowes Park
Canonbury
Deptford
Enfield
Goodmayes
Greenford
Hainault
Harrow
Hornchurch
Hounslow
Kingston
Leytonstone
Mitcham
Mortlake
New Malden
New Southgate
North Finchley
North Wembley
Palmers Green
Pimlico
Putney
Romford
South Harrow
Stamford Hill
Teddington
Tottenham
Upper Holloway
Upton Park
Vauxhall
Walthamstow
Walworth
Wembley
West Wickham
Wimbledon
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.
I wonder how open reach will fix London, particularly central London. It’s got a dismally small FTTP rollout and pretty terrible take-up on what little there is too.
Now that community fibre, hyperoptic, Gnet, vorboss and countless other have kindly filled up thier ducts will they ever now get FTTP to some places without acquiring someone?
City centres, MDUs and business dense areas have been a massive blind spot for open reach so far and it’ll be pretty embarrassing, but more importantly commercially damaging to not be covering vast swathes of London in the long run.
What do sky say when they look at areas covered by gnetwork, virgin media, community fibre and hyperoptic but NOT openreach, it’s only so long until they feel the need to plug the gap.
Central London is a problem in that they’re decommissioning a bunch of the exchanges and moving things into fibre centres at tower bridge and another one down near milbank or something.. I don’t have visibility of the complete plans, but central London can’t be done till that’s fixed either.
So it’s not just about accessibility to ducts, where they’re running the fibre to isn’t ready yet either.
Sky have made that decision by striking a deal with City fibre to fill in some of the gaps in coverage.
When Openreach claims they are “building” full fibre access, they in fact are stating that they are building or planning to start building full fibre access in the next twelve months.
Funnily enough I tried to get a Hyperoptic (business backup) connection installed last week in Canonbury but the last 50 odd metres of OR ducts were chock a block full with other PIA utilising services (no names mentioned). The HO team have made a Civils request to have another duct installed. Will see how long that takes to action.
Interestingly when the nearest serving footway chamber was opened I noticed that a CBT had been fitted – the Hyper guys told me all the chambers along the street were now fitted with Openreach CBTs. That’s very recent. Not sure if they’re lit (nothing to show on any wholesale checkers etc), but the mention in this article was an aid memoir.
Openreach currently building in Harrow. News to me, they’ve kept it very quiet
Compare and contrast this with North Sea Gas Conversion of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Harrow, you couldn’t go 400 yards and not trip over a trench or shed loads of William Press vans and operatives everywhere.
Then, again, the objectives were different then. Just get the conversion done as quickly as possible. It was organised like a military operation. Whereas today, one could be forgiven for thinking that the objective has been to spread the business activity associated with fibre installation as widely as possible (Giving “Competition” as the pre-text) with the effect that it gives a phoney uplift to the “Mates” economy, not only through the patchwork installation and cherry-picking but secondarily in the sweeping up of all the smaller entrants when they get taken-over or go ponto.
There was more telecom activity in Harrow in 1990-1991 when Harrow Telecable (Later to become Telewest and then Virgin) were installing co-ax.
Its all “Fantasy cable laying” care of the Openreach marketing department.
16.3 million premises ready for service is hardly ‘fantasy’.
Aren’t you the guy who reckoned that cable installation was illegal because it didn’t use existing infrastructure?
It’ll blow your mind what Openreach are doing given they’ve usable ducts and poles all over.
Openreach could absolutely bang out individual exchanges more quickly however it would slow down their build on a national level and cost more. As you’d know if you had any idea what you’re talking about.
Either way well over half again as many premises as covered by the entire High Speed Gas project in 8 years have been covered with full fibre this decade so perhaps best they aren’t following that example.
What service is this? is it XG-PON 10Gbps? My area has finally made the list but Virgin, Hyperoptic & Community Fibre (3gbps for £31!) is here so I can’t see how BT are going to compete.
No, it’s GPON – the service which is good enough for 99% of users.
It’s certainly true that other operators can undercut Openreach on price though. Their baseline FTTP pricing is regulated by OFCOM, so they can’t reduce it to compete. This was an intentional choice to make it attractive for altnets to build. You’re in the lucky situation that you have a choice.