Openreach Doc Hints at XGS-PON FTTP Plan for 3.3Gbps UK Broadband
Network operator Openreach (BT) recently published the first edition of a new Suppliers Trial Information Note (STIN) for Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband using 10Gbps capable XGS-PON technology, which interestingly appeared to hint at a series of new speed tiers. This includes symmetric speeds of 2.5Gbps and 3.3Gbps (Gigabits per second).
Openreach’s full fibre broadband network currently still uses older Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology, which places limitations on how fast they can go before capacity becomes an issue. For example, GPON supports a capacity on each trunk line of up to 2.5Gbps downstream and 1.24Gbps upstream, which needs to be shared between several premises.
As a result, Openreach’s fastest asymmetric consumer broadband product via FTTP currently maxes out at a download speed of 1.8Gbps, with uploads of 120Mbps. In addition, those rural areas covered by their Project Gigabit (Type C) roll-out contracts with the government can also access symmetric speeds, albeit only up to 1Gbps and this is more of a business product (expensive).
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However, the operator’s network is currently adopting a ComboPON approach, which in the future will make it easier for them to upgrade premises to newer fibre technologies without needing to change all the existing optical modems (ONTs) inside homes (e.g. they’d be able to use either GPON or XGS-PON based ONTs, whatever the situation requires).
Back in February 2025 ISPreview reported that Openreach planned to trial XGS-PON sometime in 2026 (here), which is a significantly faster, more cost-effective and power efficient technology (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for symmetric speed). But until now there have been no further updates, at least none that we were able to spot.
The good news is that some of our readers (here) have spotted a new STIN from Openreach – STIN 1007 (XGS-PON for FTTP), which quietly popped up sometime in April 2025. This is a technical document that sets out how the new XGS-PON technology will work within Openreach’s network, but it also gives us a pretty good idea of what product speeds they plan to offer in the future.
In particular, there are several speed tiers beyond the current top 1.8Gbps one, including 2.5Gbps and 3.3Gbps, with various different options for upload speed. Details on service pricing and product details for the trial will no doubt follow in the near future, but this offers a useful sneak peek of what we can expect. Getting the pricing and availability right will be key if Openreach are to compete with the altnets, many of which have been using XGS-PON for years.
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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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Great news, although probably not worth getting excited about yet. Pricing will likely be beyond the reach of many if 1Gbps Symmetric is anything to go by.
I suspect the asymmetric tiers will be a lot more consumer affordable.
I suppose it depends how competitive they want to be. A lot of altnets are symmetric by default. Even Virgin over Nexfibre is only +£6 per month.
But Openreach pricing is just the start – what premium the ISP wants to put on it will also factor
Great news for many of us! I love to have FTTP 330/330 tier! Perfect for home but sadly FTTP not available yet.
I’ll assume the symmetrical speeds are part of the project gigabit thing so they’ve put them on it
Those prioritised speeds are shocking, imagine paying for a 3.3Gbps symmetric connection but only being guaranteed a minimum speed of 110Mbps.
The prioritised speed should be 1Gbps minimum.
That’s not realistic though, if you have thousands of customers in an a region you can’t be expected to provision that kind of 1000 gigabit backhaul that then goes mainly unused.
This is just because each 10 Gbps fibre is shared by up to 32 premises, I believe many altnets are split upto 64:1. In the real world it’s extremely unlikely you’ll be unable to saturate the connection at any given moment but of course they can’t guarantee it.
If you want 3:1 contention you’ll pay handsomely for it. Broadband is much, much cheaper than a leased line because of contention. If you want your broadband to perform like a leased line you’ll pay like a leased line.
@john have you not got it the wrong way around? I thought it was Openreach who shares between more and the Altnets less.
I found that out from somewhere when I was looking for info about FTTP before i made the jump.
This is the thing I thought was strange when I looked at FTTP, Plusnet 75Mb/s connection is 40Mb minimum guaranteed speed, that is not much more than what I got with FTTC, so what was the point in changing I thought, the upload speed was only slightly faster.
Not too dissimilar to the rate in SIN 506. I think they just represent the worst case ie your PON being full of high speed customers. In reality your PON probably isn’t 100% full and many will be in more like 100M than 1G
@john, BT/Openreach are the ones with congestion as they still to this day, deploy, legacy GPON and not at least XGS-PON like the ALTNETS, and even VM’s NexFibre.
This is part of the reason why BT/Openreach didn’t make symmetric plans available because it spells serious trouble if they did.
Forward thinking ALTNETS, like the mighty Netomnia, are looking to deploy 50PON by end of this year. No hanging around for decades like BT/Openreach dinosaur company and that’s what is great about ALTNETS, no time wasting or endless so called trials used as a delay tactic for investment. Sure, the ALTNETS coverage is still limited, but that’s a thing that grows to new areas over time and with some consolidation.
I think Cityfibre’s prioritised rate is even lower – https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/fttp-speeds/ assuming that’s accurate (which it may not be).
The prioritised rates are the rates they aim to deliver on the PON if it’s under heavy load/congested in reality this usually doesn’t happen, and you get much closer to your peak rate.
This is assuming of course everything can actually handle that rate, I think steam for instance throttles to 2.5Gbit/s, and it often becomes CPU bound way before that due to decompressing assets as it downloads them.
How acceptable those rates are really comes down to price, if it’s cheap then fair enough if they’re charging £££ a month it’s less acceptable as they should be investing more in capacity.
There is essentially zero congestion past or present on Openreach’s FTTP anonymous. Their upload is so low partly to avoid congestion as they’re so fixated with avoiding it.
Nearly all altnets have higher split ratios than Openreach in case you weren’t aware and they don’t really matter. Congestion on PONs in the UK is almost unknown. Most often found on CityFibre or maybe Hyperoptic GPON ports in areas where they sold well or have a couple of heavy users on the same segment.
Netomnia are awesome. I’m delighted with the product they provide me. Can say they’re awesome without making stuff up about Openreach.
Aren’t splitters connected to CBT ports which are allocated to each property? So actual useage depends on take up?
that’ll certainly take the winds out of the altnet sails, especially if Openreach are permitted to charge something approaching market rate for it.
Openreach already has the coverage and resiliency points in its favour – now it’ll be doing symmetric XGS too. Presumably some ISPs have asked for it and they intend to deliver, exactly as many of us said it would.
you do post bull, Openreach will price things to such an extent that it will unaffordable for many people.
Not that I want to, but I can get 2GB/s up and down for £64 a month, no doubt cheaper if I tried to get an offer.
Out of reach is out of date .
Deliver yes, but as usual, so far behind the curve of what millions can get with other providers.
with trade-offs, like reduced resiliency (look at the major outages of some of the altnets, recently) and the scourge of CGNAT alongside crap routing if your altnet isn’t CityFibre or NexFibre and you have to use some no-name ISP.
Openreach gives me things I value more, such as the widest choice of ISP, and if reasonably priced symmetric becomes available then it literally becomes a no brainer.
BT Ivor, are you saying Netomnia/You Fibre have rubbish routing???
I’m sure Jeremy the CEO would say something to that if he visits this thread. Openreach have had decades to get things right, the ALTNETS just started so you have to give them some reasonable patience with small outages whilst they tune or upgrade their kit. Obviously, long drawn out outages are another thing. One thing some of the Altnets need to do (and Netomnia included) is a system status page.
Openreach don’t have any resiliency points besides the power supply. A GEA-FTTP customer has a single fibre path to a single OLT port living on a single line card or incorporated into a chassis on a single OLT.
After the OLT down to the CP. Some have resilient backhaul everywhere, some have a mix of resilient and SPoF.
It isn’t just power. It’s the total lack of electronics in the street (before pedants pipe up – not including the handful of remote OLT locations). It’s the co-location of Openreach and CP equipment in actual buildings. It’s the use of smaller splits per PON. There’s also the larger workforce which means they don’t need to ship technicians from the other side of the country.
Essentially it’s all the things that people decry as “dinosaur like” and “inefficient”.
@BTIvor, I am fine with what I have got, as long as they can give me broadband for a decent price and it works, I really don’t care about choice of provider. I have been with this provider now for almost 2 years and the majority of that time, it has been trouble free, just the small problem at the start when someone decided to stick a bucket in the fibre while dong some work on the roads. But that affected other providers as well.
12 months contract, so if they do muck up, I don’t have to wait too long, no increase in prices while in contract and do you know what is one of the better things? They leave me alone, no trying to sell me other stuff like TV services or mobile phone sims. But since Plusnet stopped doing extras, they stopped sending me emails towards the end of my time with them.
Don’t forget, I did not even want to go onto FTTP in the first place, it was plusnet that forced me to an Alt net by insisting that I went to FTTP, at a price I did not want to pay for speed I did not need and stick me on a 24-month contract. They did back down and said I could stay on FTTC, but the price was still too high and still on a 24-month contract. I was looking at other options when Zzoomm sent me a leaflet offering 500Mb/s for £24 a month. after some thinking abvout it, I took the offer, I thought I may as well, not because of the speed, I would still took it even for 150 or even 70.
I was being pushed to fibre, so it was a chance to get away from Openreach. I tried it once before with a wireless network, it did not go as planned, which is why I was a bit hesitant to try again.
After all, as much as I detest Openreach and BT, it is a large company and is pretty stable as companies go, I just did not mean to stay so long with plusnet.
What will happen in the future? No idea, with Zzoomm merging or what ever with Fullfiber, may give people the choice of providers. Looking at fullfibre website, I am not so sure if I would move to any of the choices they have.
At the end of the day, Zzoomm came here at the right time to get my custom, I am and never have been a person that is loyal to any company, but I do try and support smaller or companies that are not main stream, if that is the right way to put it. I like to support local if I can, but sometimes not possible and also price.
I will stay with a company or have products from them if their products are good for a good price, like I stuck with AMD for CPU and corsair for memory and later on SSD.
As long as Zzoomm carry on offering the service it is offering, I will stay with them, I see no reason to change, even if I changed to a ISP on the Openreach network, apart from the hassle of having another fibre network installed, I am not going to get anything cheaper for the speed I am getting and even at lower speeds the savings are not enough to go through the hassle.
At the moment, I am fine with what I have, I love it that we have competition and that Openreach at long last have more competition than just virgin in a few places.
I never thought i would see the day that we have fibre here, but then I never thought I would see the day that we would have anything faster than ADSL here. 🙂
This city don’t normally get stuff like large cities do and a lot of people and companies would not even know where we are, which is why I wonder who paid Zzoomm to come here, but maybe they did see it as a chance to get customers.
I hope it works out for altnets,
Sorry for the long post.,
Too little. Too late. Roll on 50PON and beyond by tge mighty Netomnia 🙂
Altnets nothing to worry about here, as BT pricing will be horrendous, hence the differing upload tier rates instead if just one symmetric speed. BT slicing up the cake as usual.
Move on, nothing to see.
BT is always overpriced, but I presume you mean Openreach prices will be so over the top that most providers will not touch it as there will be little benefit. The only ones who may touch it are those like Zen.
you would have thought in this day and age with the tech available, Openreach would have symmetric broadband.
i find having 500Mb/s upload useful these days, even if I don’t use it a lot, still good when grabbing files from my NAS.
And for the 27 million premises in the UK that can’t get Netomnia as of the end of 2027?
So Polish Poler, will that change the horrendous BT/Openreach pricing then? Nope, didn’t think so. Also, Netomnia is just one Altnet, there are others too.
lol “mighty” Netomnia my eye. They don’t bother to build 100% of a town!
You know the pricing of the products already? I mean I can’t really argue with that. The symmetrical 1000 from the Project Gigabit contracts is not a guide by the way at all.
Enjoyed you spending months raving about their inferior technology, etc, then they mention tiers one scale altnet beat and another match come out and you are onto how altnets have nothing to worry about due to pricing.
Openreach, thanks to all their advantages, have most of the FTTP market in many areas with a single or multiple altnets. I can only apologise if reality is inconvenient and hope you’re enjoying Virgin Media’s cable.
@Notomnia no-one with any scale does.
I assume you are in a direct in ground area they’d need to dig or build poles down the streets to reach. They don’t build tons of poles after getting complaints when they did so in Peterlee and their budget is about £300 per premises passed. They’ll dig if they can spread the cost between enough properties to stay within budget.
The network builders are nearly all there to make money. If they can spend 30 grand reaching a hundred properties with their regular build or 30 grand on a street of 20 properties as it all needs ducts, they have to dig to get there, the installs are more expensive, etc, guess which one they’re going to do?
When the first FTTP was launched by VM, back in late 2008, I was keen to get it, hoping that VM would upgrade the street I live in, thankfully Openreach stopped by with FTTP, and moved via ZEN the quality of the connection is so much better than VM, now on FTTP, I am so content with what I’ve got that I probably won’t be interested in upgrading to any other speed ranges in the long term or ever.
Oh and BTW, since FTTP been other home owners have ditched VM for Openreach based FTTP.
For those interested here is my connection via FTTP, much better than VM via cable.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/broadband/monitoring/quality/share/63ac832d49ac4765d8f6cdce38ee8cf316eb7c25-15-05-2025
will these cost hundreds as well mark?
Too late for me. Been on openreach for years, I’ll be moving to Hyperoptic really soon, they have a promotion on their monthly rolling plan.
If and when openreach ever do sell symmetrical fibre and make it available I’ll consider it if the price isn’t ridiculous because of the line rental costs that ISPs have to pay to openreach.
How amazing to have a choice! We’re in a city of 130,000 where half of it remains a fibre desert. Still rocking on 70Mbps VDSL for who knows how long (unless VM wholesale happens soon)…
I was thinking the same but decided to park and wait for Openreach or another altnet because people online complain of frequent issues, large price rises and also from an engineering POV, their engineering teams are based out in Serbia. Me personally, I would only trust an ISP if some part of their engineering teams are based in the UK especially because of more and more breaches this year.
But good luck to you
Not exactly hurting you given you refuse to use any ISP other than Andrews and Arnold, are looking forward to a life-changing leap when fibre comes from that 70/20 to 115/20 and have like once used over 500 GB in a month though really Mr Stevens, is it?
You make it sound like you’re desperate for more bandwidth and are stuck overpaying.
What does the downstream prioritised column mean?
Pretty much anything upto that speed will be priority then after that it’s whatever they can afford to provide on the circuit
Purely of academic interest while Project Gigafail has no interest, never mind a plan for much of rural UK.
It’s a world away from the public service Universal Delivery Obligation that the Post Office continues to deliver despite competition from Delivery companies.
Since 5G mobile broadband is already established and building out at competitive rates (still three networks) there’s every chance that FTTP will be irrelevant because 5G got rural first and network competition continues.
No one thinks 5G is a serious competitor to fibre. Not even the mobile operators. That’s why they are all major fixed line ISPs as well. Three made a good go of it but I’d expect Voda3 to start pushing VF fibre products to eligible customers once the merger is finalised.
There are probably a lot more rural people who can get FTTP than can get reliable high speed 5G, and given 5G comes with variability, CGNAT, probably needs an outdoor antenna – why would I move to it from my perfectly functional, cheaper, uncapped, lower latency FTTC (sic)?
Royal Mail is trying to reduce its USO obligations and the actual Post Office (owned by the govt) has been closing and downsizing for years now. At least Openreach is trying to improve things…
Not often I say this, but BT Ivor is right on this. 🙂
Indeed, Ivor is spot on here. 5G is not a competitor for FTTP.
My Brother-In-Law has decided to go down the 5G route and it’s not a patch even on decent FTTC with video calls constantly breaking up.
It’s worth noting that mobile needs backhaul, and the thing that pushes the price of backhaul down is access to cheap data services like FTTP, as opposed to having to use expensive leased lines or microwave links. If backhaul prices are high, then the networks will have to increase their charges to keep links uncongested (or, of course, just declare that speeds above 10 kbit/s are “as available”, and that packet loss can be expected outside the cheap areas to serve).
For example, a nearby Three mast to me (4G LTE only, no 5G) uses 4x FTTC for backhaul, instead of a leased line. This makes Three’s costs to backhaul that mast much cheaper, and thus helps them keep prices down; when FTTP is available here, they’d be able to switch to 2x FTTP for backhaul and get higher speeds (ideal for a 5G NR upgrade, for example).
Similarly, it’s possible for operators to use FTTP as the “high speed” option (say a 3.3G/330M FTTP), with a much slower option (e.g. 100M symmetric microwave links) providing backup if the FTTP is down. The reduced speed of the backup link makes it easier to operate (more spare link budget for rain fade etc), and you only use it if FTTP is down (which you expect to be a rare event), throttling users on that mast if it does fail.
There’s thus a synergy between FTTP and mobile deployment; cheap FTTP means that getting adequate backhaul to masts is cheaper, so the cost of the network goes down. There’s a reason why Japan and South Korea have both FTTP everywhere and decent mobile networks…
I hate to post this, but Ivor is right.
But, I do know of a household, well two people in a house who does use mobile broadband, until a couple of years ago they were using dial up, but that was their only option at the time. Then a new mast went up not far from them, so we tried a experiment with a phone and tethering and it worked okay. So they got a small mobile router type thing, and they use that connected to their tablets and laptops.
It works fine, and they can even stream onto their tablets, but these people only use the net for emails and to video chat with their son who lives away. so for that it is great.
they have no other option to be honest, but that is what uyou get when you live in the middle of the sticks.
worst ever provider. It would be nice if they left the market. They have nothing to offer not even symmetrical uploads. Only uk offers garbage providers like this. Money hungry monopoly provider. They don’t know what good broadband is.
Dont know if you can read, but its says there will be various symmetrical plans. As for the UK offering poor speeds? Yes we are behind other european counties, but ahead of most of Australia. In the US you cant get gigabit speeds at the same coverage (85%) of the UK. We still have better coverage than other countries. As for Openreach leaving the market? Its the UK’s biggest telecommunications provider – this is what they do.
I’m not sure you understand what the word monopoly means.
Can see the business focused ones have much higher priority, but wow the lower speed tiers is so cluttered, dont need all those tiers.
Those aren’t the retail offerings. Having that range of wholesale offerings enables retail ISPs to differentiate, focussing on different market sectors.
If such a thing actually exists to a significant extent in the consumer broadband internet access market.
It also allows the marketeers to do clever (for them) pricing strategies.
I have literally just upgraded to 1gigabit per second internet recently and boom I end seeing BT is going to offer this bro….. :/
If you open your wallet and let them empty it, yes.
It’s a trial. In 2026. No commercials have yet been announced. Let alone any ISP offers to end customer. You can boom away on your gigabit connection for a while yet bro.
Why can’t Openreach just put 160/160, 330/330 or 550/550 for home FTTP, that’s more than enough for everyones at home.
openreach are going to get left behind unless they up their upload
i have an openreach connection and it’s a joke that it has gigabit down but 110mbit up, symmetric not even being an option but even if it was their price is a “go away” price. I also have a competitor fibre, which costs half as much, and is fully symmetric. I’m sure you can guess which one i’ll be keeping.
5G are pretty much the same never get full symmetric. Three get 1250/150, EE get 800/100
Loving my 8gb/8gb with youfibre and a static ip to boot!….
Only if UK has 100% youfibre (oh I wish!) as I know youfibre are pretty good 8000/8000 fully symmetric!
Me too but not really relevant to this.
I’m just happy to see signs of progress. More upload on Openreach is overdue.
Netomnia seems to have developed a cult following, do people move into its coverage areas, as its quite extraordinary the amount of people that have it when it has such small coverage.