Openreach to Cut Price of FTTP Broadband Rental on UK Proactive Upgrades

Network operator Openreach (BT) appears to be giving UK migrations from legacy fixed lines to modern Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband services a boost by offering UK ISPs and their customers a special discount on rental prices, albeit only when upgrades occur via their Proactive Upgrades process.

Consumers are normally the ones to initiate an upgrade to full fibre (FTTP), but with Proactive Upgrades the initiator is your ISP. Proactive migrations thus arise where your ISP proposes an upgrade to new FTTP lines from your older broadband services (ADSL, FTTC etc.) and, at the same time, books an appointment for an engineer to carry out the upgrade (the end user can still confirm, reject or select a different appointment).

Openreach has recently been busy improving their Proactive Upgrade process, such as by significantly shortening its lead time (here). The latest development is that they’ve introduced a new special offer on this process, which essentially enables customers to potentially be upgraded to the “1000/115Mbps [download/upload], 550/75Mbps and 330/50Mb bandwidth tiers for the rental price of 80/20Mbps” – lasting for up to 24 months (details).

Just for context. The standard wholesale rental price of their 80Mbps broadband tier on FTTP is usually £259.20 +vat per year (£21.6 per month) and for their 1000Mbps tier it’s £469.20 +vat (£39.10 monthly), although in practice it may be lower than this due to the impact of certain Equinox 2 discounts. But regardless, this could be quite an attractive incentive to help people upgrade, assuming ISPs do pass it on (very likely).

The actual offer pricing is set to become available between 10th October 2025 and 9th April 2026 and, naturally, upgrades must proceed to a successful FTTP installation in order to qualify.

A New Feature

In addition to the above, Openreach has also launched the Proactive FTTP Upgrade journey for their slowest 0.5Mbps speed tier, which is usually meant to help support land-line only phone migrations to IP based voice alternatives. This will support “migrations from certain PSTN-based [Public Switched Telephone Network] copper services facing retirement (WLR, WLR + SMPF & ISDN 2).” The free standard connection charge offer thus now applies to this too.

Finally, on the issue of wholesale vs retail rental prices, it’s always worth pointing out that the price you pay at retail will be higher than at wholesale because ISPs have to add 20% VAT, profit margins and various other network/service costs on top in order to create the product you actually buy.