Openreach Reveal UK Pilot Pricing for 3.3Gbps FTTP Home Broadband Tier

Network operator Openreach (BT) has this afternoon revealed the first pricing for their forthcoming pilot of XGS-PON based Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP lines, which is due to get underway in March 2026. But for now they’re only revealing how much they’ll charge for the 3.3Gbps (3300Mbps) tier.

Just to recap. Openreach’s current full fibre service is largely still based off 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 (Gigabits per second) 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 and uploads of 120Mbps (ISPs usually play it safe and promote this as c.1.6Gbps). However, rural areas covered by their government-funded Project Gigabit (Type C) roll-out contracts can separately access symmetric speeds, albeit only up to 1Gbps, and that’s priced more as a premium business product.

By comparison, the operator’s new XGS-PON technology can potentially handle speeds of up to 10Gbps (the ‘X’ stands for 10, the ‘G’ for Gigabits’ and the ‘S’ for Symmetric speed), which will help them to offer faster broadband speeds and be more competitive with rivals that already have faster tiers using similar upgrades. Consumers might not strictly need such speeds yet, but marketing departments can still use it.

Back in September 2025 ISPreview revealed (here) that Openreach were planning to trial XGS-PON technology in early 2026, which would reach about 40,000 premises in Guildford and push download speeds from ISPs up to a blistering 8.5Gbps (8,500Mbps). The new briefing gives us our first practical taste of that by setting out the pricing for their future 3.3Gbps tier, which will come with upload speeds of either 330Mbps or 3300Mbps (symmetric). This is ONLY for residential premises.

At £324 +vat per year (or £27 per month) this looks to be quite competitively priced. But it’s worth remembering that Openreach’s price only reflects the wholesale cost of the line, while retail ISPs still have to add all sorts of extra costs on top before getting to the price you pay (e.g. 20% VAT, network/service features, general costs/support, profit margin etc.).

Consumers in the trial area who already take an FTTP connection from Openreach will of course also need another quick engineer visit in order to upgrade the internal Optical Network Terminal (ONT) to one that supports XGS-PON. We’ve previously revealed details of the new ONTs they’ll be using to support this service (here).

The 8.5Gbps speed mentioned earlier is initially more about testing the capabilities of their new network to handle that performance than launching a commercial product at such speeds (i.e. we suspect it might not be given a price). But the planned future product speeds in their official documentation currently only go up to 3.3Gbps, which to be fair is absolutely fine – it’s still a very impressive performance level.

The classic catch with packages this fast is that most consumers would struggle to harness those top speeds, usually due to Wi-Fi/device limits and any limitations of the online servers you’re connecting with (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver). But if you’re happy to pay for it, why not. The rest of the internet will catch up eventually, and rivals already have faster tiers than 3.3Gbps.

At present it’s too early to identify which ISPs will be launching customer trials using the new 3.3Gbps tier, although EE (BT) were the first to do so when the prior 1.8Gbps tier first emerged. One of the biggest obstacles for other ISPs is that they often have to wait for the next layer of wholesale providers to begin offering circuits at such speeds before they can do the same and this often takes time.