Openreach Builds FTTP Broadband to 17 Million UK Premises
National network access provider Openreach (BT) has today revealed that their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which offers broadband speeds of up to 1800Mbps to homes and businesses via hundreds of ISPs, has now covered 17 million UK premises. This includes more than 4.3 million premises in “rural and hard-to-reach areas“.
The data means that Openreach, which also saw their overall broadband usage (data / internet traffic) surge by 10.8% during the year (representing traffic from multiple communication providers), added a total of 4.2 million additional UK premises to the coverage of their “full fibre” network during 2024 (i.e. an extra home or business every 8 seconds).
The operator is currently investing up to £15bn to expand the coverage of this full fibre network to reach 25 million UK premises by December 2026 (here), which includes around 6.2 million premises in rural or semi-rural areas. On top of that, they’ve also expressed an ambition to reach up to 30 million by the “end of 2030“, although this is partly dependent upon a favourable outcome from Ofcom’s next Telecoms Access Review 2026 (TAR).
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Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said:
“Fast, reliable connectivity is essential for the UK, and the increased traffic on our broadband network is evidence that customers are increasingly reliant on it in their daily lives.
We’re building and connecting people faster than ever before and I’m proud of the progress our engineers have made. We’re well on our way to delivering our ambition of reaching 25 million homes and business by the end of 2026, and now our sights are set on reaching 30 million premises by the end of 2030,
While over a third of properties have already switched, there’s plenty of room for more people to get a better connection right now. So why not check if you could get faster – and potentially cheaper – broadband today.”
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although some providers have started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.
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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Amazing achievement for our country!
Fantastic work!
Not fantastic for us. We dropped the BT landline as zero internet after a long fight. Their contractual promise was to offer a minimum of 0.2 bps download speed. There was no point. We have to use Three mobile telephony boxes instead.
Bypassed by them. I see fibre on poles through front and back windows but only to the first 5 houses on the street fed from Chorley. The rest fed from bamber bridge get 7mb with 500kb upload and no plans to install fibre as we are at the end of the run with no bearers. Openreach should complete builds before disappointing others with shoddy builds.
lol, shoddy because you don’t happen to be connected yet. their work is far better quality than most altnets
You’re going to want to check with your provider again, because Openreach now allow for FTTP connections on the back of already existing lines nearby. Put simply, if a house nearby has FTTP, yours might as well have it as they’d extend a new fibre cable to your property. It’s absolutely worth chasing, and if your provider is dragging feet, opt for an alternative provider also using Openreach
Neither OR investment nor the ineffective Project Gigabit are bothering with rural Kent villages with only 3,000 inhabitants so these claimed success stories are just Myth and Legends of a place far far away.
From an ISPReview article in November 2024: “The operator claims to have so far deployed their new full-fibre network across over 480,000 homes and businesses in Kent.” The roll-out is on-going.
Just wasting time with ‘Archers Court’ exchange. Done a few roads, which started months, maybe year ago, but most STILL waiting for FTTP, despite them doing nearby Dover exchange pretty quickly, even engineers up poles in the rain!. Don’t know if a separate team, but FTTC cabinets full here and often unorderable, then slow upload speeds for most because of crosstalk noise.
Same here, we’ve been waiting for 5 years. It’s being coming by every “end of April” since then.
They come back once a year and do a few roads then clear off.
We’ll be Dec 2026 at this rate, despite being announced in 2020.
Openreach seems to find it harder to provide full-fibre connections to residents in high-rise buildings in urban centres than to remote areas with sparse populations.
Primarily because they require wayleave permission from the building owner and those owners are often hard to find or want an exclusive deal with someone else.
The implicit wayleave that exists for telephony does not apply to broadband.
Yes you are correct, as this is due to a number of factors, main one being permission to do the work either through councils which take a long time to agree contracts, or trying to get hold of private owners, who may live over seas and be difficult to contact or not respond at all
@125us says: and G says:
Indeed, I agree that access to buildings is creating obstacles but the providers have also had several years to address these kinds of issues either directly or via the Ofcom/Government. They now have two years left to hit their claimed targets but are unlikely to achieve this until there is a resolution to in this area.
I’m waiting for my turn of 8 seconds of attention. That is an incredible statistic but also rubs salt in the wounds of us left out.
I feel for the people that miss out and want it, but blame our governments, if they had acted years ago, we could have had a dark fibre free from profit making years ago, but as normal, this country is years behind others.
Which country that we are supposedly years behind has a not-for-profit dark fibre network to serve people’s houses?
@Ad47uk says:
That is not true. The level of investment required is beyond the means of any government. It is also for the businesses to invest in their own networks not for governments to interfere. The job of the governments is to safeguard the economic and legal environments to allow companies to conduct their business but this is not something our governments are up to – let alone install a nationwide fibre optic network.
To all those missing out – move house!
Yeah, that is so easy for everyone.
No please be quiet.
Fast Broadband should be universal and not a postcode lottery.
@No name says:
I am not sure that is true. Look at some of the places that have received government funding to be amongst the areas to be the first to go full fibre, yet have ridiculously low take-up levels. That is a ridiculous business proposition and it has meant that those living in areas treated less favourably but more likely to take up full fibre have been placed at a disadvantage. While all this is going on, providers have had to incurr costs on investment that is generating very low levels of revenue. Not good is it?
Different issues.
If a place gets funding, they should be forced onto FTTP. Same products, same price, regardless of delivery. You can still order 35Mb on FTTP.
Everything is moving online, so to leave some houses out, as you suggest is insane.
Shall we start taking electricity and water off people too?
100% FTTP coverage is a goal to aspire to. It’s not impossible either.
@No Name says:
The intent is to move everyone onto the fibre networks as part of the PSTN shutdown, but the providers have a lot of preparation to do in the meantime. You may also be unaware of all the kerfuffle around the migration of those on alarms and devices dependent on the PSTN for a power supply. The big issue is not about the coverage but with the priorities of the roll-out which is making it more costly than necessary and means it takes longer for providers to generate revenue by focusing on areas where there is likelihood of a low take-up of services.
@Fara82Light agreed. FTTP should be built to everywhere first, then overbuild, but of course it’s all about money e.g. cheapest and easiest first, etc. and not about everyone being happy! Such a shame…
I was surprised at the rapidity of it all. I had an email from Openreach saying they were starting my town, then three weeks later another saying they were done. I contacted my ISP the same day and had FTTP within a week.
In 2 years my street has gone from xDSL only to having Virgin fibre, an Altnet and Openreach available.
Thats why its been rapid for you, competition.
Those areas with no Alt Nets are in for a wait
@No Name, not sure I agree with that. Airband built here recently but Openreach are nowhere to be seen!
I knew that would get the Openreach fanboys excited. Openreach is a large company that have been grabbing money from overpriced services via their parent company for years, to be honest, I would have though they would have been further along. the thing is like other companies they are only doing what is good for them and unless they are supported by the government, which again is from us, others will be missed.
If you lot really think that BT cares about us, then you are deluded, they are a company and like all companies, including the provider I am with, they are doing it for MONEY.
I love how your response to these truly impressive numbers is “not fast enough”, but then I suspect anything the BT Group does would not be to your liking. Most of these premises will be covered by the commercial rollout and without government subsidy.
Openreach have a far higher standard to put homes in the “too hard bucket” than virtually any altnet, for the simple reason that the sooner they can get to 100% coverage in an exchange area, the sooner they can reap the savings from the copper stop sell and eventual withdrawal
Yep BT only cares about MONEY!
Of course BT, a private company, have their primary objective of making money. Their obligations to their shareholders inform everything they do, and the build cost at which they deem a rollout to be commercially viable is part of that. Everybody else can talk about BT without having to point out that they’re a for-profit organisation each time.
Do you think CityFibre are building their own network with investors money to generously give people a choice of FTTP providers?
If BT gave up and handed the company back to the government, that would make me happy, should never have been privatised in the first place.
Openreach and higher standard? You are deluded, you must have far too much money in that company. The only ones they cover are the ones they think are going to get them money, which is normal as they are a company, I bet they would love the alt nets to vanish, must make a difference, even if it is only a small difference.
I don’t think the fibre network should be in any company hands, altnets or Openreach, but this is the place we are and if I can avoid giving my money to Openreach, then that makes me happier
The only reason openreach is doing the fibre network is that their old copper network is falling apart and getting expensive to keep going, also alt net competition.
They seemed to jump quickly when we had an altnet here, before that they did not seem interested, that what it seemed like
i had a laugh last week, going for a walk, and we saw this house with an Openreach van in the drive and a Zoomm connection. 🙂
Fed up with arguing with Bloated toad fanboys anyway, who would love the whole country to be BT only.
Why do you expect a business to “care”? The goal of a business is to make a profit. If it does not, it ceases trading. I doubt anyone would work free of charge without some form of income.
As to the roll-out plan: it would indeed be very different if it were not for government interference. Openreach’s priorities would be areas where there is expected to be a high level of take up, and not wasting investment in remote areas where it is unlikely to ever recover the costs.
@Ad47uk says::
BT is an independent company which should never have been nationalised (in its previous forms) at all. Governments do not know how to run businesses, they barely know how to run the state. It took more than 10 years to fix BT after decades of being a state-controlled body – we cannot afford to waste that time again.
The ESN – Emergency Services Network, the replacement for the Airwave trunked digital radio service – is currently seven years overdue because the Home Office thought that the UK had 100% mobile phone coverage! Now, EE is being paid millions of pounds of public money to build more 4G masts in rural areas to get round this enormous mistake and the CMA (Competition and Markets Authority, which oversees monopolies to prevent excess profit-making) has limited the Airwave provider – Motorola Solutions, Inc., which won the contract to provide software for the ESN! – to making not more than £200 million profit per annum until the ESN is up and running.
You just couldn’t write this stuff…