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.
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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.
| Bandwidth | Pilot rental | Operative date |
| Up to 3300/330 Mbit/s | £324.00 p.a. | 01/03/2026 |
| Up to 3300/3300 Mbit/s | £360.00 p.a. | 01/03/2026 |
| Connection | Pilot charge | Operative date |
| Standard Connection | £122.84 | 01/03/2026 |
| Premium Connection | £152.84 | 01/03/2026 |
| Advanced Connection | £297.84 | 01/03/2026 |
| Standard Connection – XGS Box Swap | £0.00 | 01/03/2026 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades Connection Standand | £0.00 | 01/03/2026 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades Connection Premium | £30.00 | 01/03/2026 |
| Proactive FTTP Upgrades Connection Advanced | £175.00 | 01/03/2026 |
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).
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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.
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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Encouraging pricing, should allow ISPs to set retail pricing in line with what Sky can do on CityFibre
BT still peddling asymmetric speeds on XGS-PON instead of just symmetric at that speed point, laughable.
Wait, I thought the BT fan boys on here over the months were saying BT got it right with GPON and no business case for faster or for symmetric. Meanwhile the ALTNETS continue to eat into the customer base which is disguised by continuous roll out of FTTP to keep the figures up. Once the FTTP build is complete, and assuming no takeovers by likes of Vermin Media, it will be interesting to see the figures for the ALTNETS – I suspect the BT customer base will only go down forcing them to try and cut prices to try and oust the ALTNETS at that time…..
No, I think they said that it was sensible to deploy cheaper equipment now and go to XGS later when their customers (the ISPs) ask them to do so, and that the use of an “obsolete technology” (or whatever you called it) won’t hinder their market share all that much.
Which is pretty much what has happened. GPON is still more than good enough for many customers, especially those that OR needs to get off of copper, and now they can overlay XGS for their more demanding users and slowly phase out GPON over the very long term. Win-win.
The altnets are only making inroads on wholesale price, not on technology. Most users still don’t care that much about symmetric and won’t be choosing an ISP because of it. Even then, Openreach continues to have industry leading takeup that every altnet wishes they could get close to.
@FANNY ADAMS, the only thing we can do is wait and see what happens,
The budget may make a difference to what some people can afford anyway, plus next year when the greedy councils want more from us
@jonny that’s some amazing mental gymnastics you’re pulling to believe that BT’s customer losses are ‘disguised by continuous roll out of FTTP”.
On the one hand, BT report their line losses to the city every quarter, so if they’re disguising that, they’re doing a terrible job as it’s having a major negative drag on their share price!
On the other hand, BT is managing to maintain a 38% take-up rate on FTTP DEPITE the adding over a million homes to the footprint every quarter. That’s also reported by them very openly – so this ‘disguising’ you’re on about must be truly shambolic!
“ 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.”
Please stop saying this. Plenty of home equipment now has 10GbE as standard, including the ubiquitous Apple Mac. Most WiFi 7 access points are 5-10Gb ports which most mobile phone from the last 2 years supports. So consumers very much “make the most” of high bandwidths way in excess of 1 gbit if not full 10GbE.
The minority of techies like me who’ve got fibre at home run 100gbit+ already.
10Gbit LANs are already the norm and 1gbit is already last decade.
“10Gbit LANs are already the norm “. Really?
No because that paragraph remains correct for the majority of internet users in the UK.
Most people still have routers with 1Gbps and 2.5Gbps ports and LANs, so far as I can reasonably tell, but even if you do have 3.3Gbps, 10Gbps or faster broadband then not all internet services can harness it.
For example, websites will often cap individual user connections to a few Megabits to manage capacity and streaming services can only go so fast per stream (c.15-30Mbps with 4K) etc. etc.
10Gbps LANs certainly aren’t the norm inside most homes yet, and where are you getting a home 100Gbps connection from? None exist in the UK yet. Netomnia does have 50G-PON for business connections by request (c.40Gbps real-world), but not for consumers, where c.7-10Gbps is about as fast as you can reasonably go (router to broadband ISP, at least).
The base level iMac doesn’t even have wired ethernet, it’s an option to get a gigabit port. The Mac mini has gigabit as standard with 10GbE as a £100 option. The Mac Studio has 10GbE as standard, and it’s a £2099 system.
The idea that “most” phones sold in the last two years are Wi-Fi 7, “most” Wi-Fi 7 kit has at least 5GbE, or 10Gb LANs being the norm might be true from your perspective, but that’s all.
I agree with Mark, I only know of two people that I chat to about tech that has a network that can with those higher speeds, one because she has got a Nas that had 10Gbit Lan, so decided to update her network to Fibre and one I chat to online, because they are a network geek.
While I am sure there are people who may have a computer with 10Gb it Lan port, I doubt the rest of the network can cope.
Bits for higher speed lans are not cheaper, sure they are better priced than they used to be, but still pricey, I found a no name 6 port 10Gbit switch for £60, but only two of the ports support that speed.
Sadly, some ISPs will play on people to get these higher speeds, even if they don’t need it or can’t take advantage of them.
Mark is also correct about website capping speeds, not that you would notice the difference anyway unless it was full of graphics.
I find it amazing that we can now get these speeds. when not so long ago we was waiting for a low res picture to download over dial up and it was not that many years agao, i think the tech is amazing, hard to think that so much is being sent over a thin strand of glass.
So tech wise i love it.
You’re about an order of magnitude off on both counts. Most people still won’t even have 2.5G capable equipment, much less 10Gbit, and “techies” are not an exception there. Their exposure to multi gig equipment will be when their ISP sends them that 2.5/5/10GbE capable router, and maybe their PC has a 2.5G ethernet port, but probably not.
Same problem on the wifi side – newer phones and laptops and notably the PS5 Pro are WiFi 7 and often tri band too, but a lot of kit isn’t.
The number of people who use 100GbE at home is going to be absolutely infinitesimal. I know people who work for major network equipment vendors who don’t take too much of their day job home with them…
10Gb LANs are not the norm because of price and technology. The cheaper 10Gb stuff is SFP+ which means that you can’t use ethernet cables unless you buy RJ45 modules at £15 a port. For an 8 port ethernet switch you’re looking at £200, 4x what SFP+ will cost you, and that’s from Aliexpress mind you. If you’re not aware, for most people, £200 is a lot of money.
Only the more expensive WiFi 7 stuff has got 5/10Gb from what I’ve seen so most of the time you’ll be limited to 2.5gbe on WiFi 7. My phone is about 2 years old and doesn’t support 6E even and I paid over £400 for it. I’m pretty sure that most people are probably in the same boat of probably not ching anything modern enough to even have WiFi 7 and I don’t plan to upgrade for another 2 years yet so it’ll be 2027/2028 before I’m likely be able to be using WiFi on my phone.
The place that you’re living in that you think that everyone is on that kind of network is called cloud cuckoo land.
You’re living in a prosumer bubble, but lack the self-awareness to see it and conflate your experience with market realities. The best example? “The ubiquitous Mac”, which I’m also a user of.
The most optimistic data puts Macs at a market share of 5.5%. Out of those, an estimated 90% are laptops that don’t have Ethernet ports at all. Even WiFi 6e, which Apple just recently introduced, only supports real world speeds of just about 1.5Gbit under ideal conditions – meaning: Conditions that most consumers don’t have.
Even if you look at PC hardware CURRENTLY available, only about 10% of mainboards support 10Gbit, and they start at a price point of around £400. Rounding generously, 50% of the available motherboards come with 2.5Gbit and 40% still with Gigabit. Now take into account that the average age of hardware is 5-7 years, depending on the market. That makes market penetration of 10Gbit hardware absolutely laughable.
Then, take into account consumer electronics in general. IOT devices are low bandwidth and often still come with 100Mbit ports. TVs? Even LGs top OLEDs only recently started having Gigabit ports, my top of the line model from 2023 has a 100Mbit Ethernet port and Wifi 5. I couldn’t find data on LAN speeds, but out of 3100 available TV models less than 10% even have Wifi6. And why would they? 4k HDR video material streams max out 40Mbits, with an industry average of about 25Mbits.
Game consoles, even the most recent pro models, run on 1Gbit.
It’s reasonable to assume that the overwhelming majority of home networks run on 1Gbit. 2.5Gbit might be an option for enthusiasts, like gamers and professionals. For most consumers, their Internet connection is a „buy and forget“ type product and home networking speeds an afterthought. 10Gbit products are certainly readily available, at inflated price points and with very limited use cases that are unlikely to apply to the average consumer for at least another decade, by my own humble estimate.
Until then, anything above 1Gbit symmetric (2Gbit, if we’re generous) is pure marketing bloat aimed at a tiny enthusiast and prosumer market, as well as consumers who think „bigger is always better“, which is an ideal case for ISPs, as they pay for speeds they can’t utilise, keeping network utilisation low and profit margins high.
The typical UK consumer probably has their router sat next to the ONT or NT5 and only uses WiFi. As long as Netflix streams without buffering the only thing they are interested in price. Most people I know on FTTP seem to be on the 150/30 tier and if that fulfills their needs why pay more? I just dropped from 900/110 to 500/70 when swapping from BT to Plusnet and the only time I noticed any difference – when running speediest. We forget that people contributing on ISP Review are not generally typical UK consumers.
3300Mbps down and 3300Mbps up via Openreach not the BTWholesale, I was wondering who will selling it? I reckon very few probably the first ISP will offering it is CerberusISP.
Phil,
I dont agree. Sky and Vodafone sell multi-gig on Cityfibre etc. EE has been selling 1.6gbit for ages. As for Cerberus this is a residential product according to the report. If its priced below £75 a month or so i will be getting it if all goes well.
They will all try to sell it if it is going to make them more money, even if they know the person they are selling it to don’t need it. Sadly, that is the way businesses are, you may get the odd one working there that will not try to talk consumers into going faster.
Even if the consumer doesn’t phone and does everything though the website, the faster services are put at a cheaper price to start with to get people to take them up and then hopefully stick with them when the prices increase.
Even the one I am with, they tempted me with a faster speed for less money for the first year, it was the price that got me to the faster speed. The only difference is with the provider I am with is a 12-month contract and no price increase in that contract.
I trust most businesses, certainly larger ones, as much as I trust politicians
how do you know BT wholesale wont sell it
1,000 Mb/s symmetrical has an annual rental of £1,200 pa, but 3,300 Mb/s symmetrical has an annual rental of £360 pa… That doesn’t seem to make any sense?
It does if the goal was to check-box a technical performance requirement with the government, while discouraging actual take-up and use 🙂 .
as well as what Mark has said, I would assume there is a technical restriction in that they deployed GPON to those subsidised areas and don’t particularly want one customer to be able to take up almost all of the PON upload capacity.
OR are not the only such culprit. There are subsidised altnets (who use XGS and can’t use that excuse) who also charge very heftily for gig symmetric and/or tie it to business packages with long contracts.
My guess is that OR will offer a more sensibly priced gig symmetric tier in areas with XGS availability and in both the commercial and subsidised footprints.
I believe this is pricing for the pilot only. In order for the pilot to actually get people connected it has to be priced at a level to make it worth ISPs getting involved (although it might end up being only BT/EE).
The commercial pricing will almost certainly be completely different.
Even bog-standard 1000/115 is £469.20+VAT per year at wholesale, and 330/50 is £364.32+VAT.
‘Available to Residential premises only, i.e. a premise that Openreach considers to be predominantly used as a residential dwelling, according to data obtained from Ordnance Survey’
Is interesting and keeps lower pricing a possibility for the actual product without harming their business revenues especially.
Just to reinforce this isn’t a trial, it’s a pilot. Openreach generally don’t hugely change pricing between pilot and production as part of the pilot is gauging the demand at that price in a wider scale, real-world deployment.
Far be it from me to criticise the market leader, but what even is the point of that 3300/330 tier given the tiny price difference between it and symmetric. Why even bother to offer it?
Given that they love to mention my name, I look forward to comments from F. Adams as I seem to remember that they thought OR’s XGS symmetric offer would be too expensive and have “too many upload tiers”, but that does not seem to be the case.
Bad news for the altnets either way!
Fanny Winkleman has detected a traitor in our midst. Who is the one that speaks out against BT? We can reveal as no other than BT Ivor 🙂
I posted near the top… enjoy….
hopefully the 2.5g up/down service will be quite nicely priced.
So ISPs can sell symmetric as a profitable boost for £10 pcm would be my guess. The 3.3 Gbps figure is an odd one though kinda forces the ISP to supply a more expensive 10 Gbe router without speeds competitive with alt-nets like 5 Gbps and 8 Gbps. Whereas if they’d gone with 2.5 Gbps a cheaper router would’ve been fine. I’m sure they know what they are doing.
Same reason they offered 40/2 and 40/10 on FTTC.
Will this just require a new ONT? or will another fibre need to be installed for a symmetric connection?
ONT and your ISP might need to supply a new router, depending on what they already provide. The same fibre itself could theoretically cope with Terabit speeds, so it’s more a matter of what kit you put on it etc.
@Mark Jackson – any chance if there any ISP rep thought on Openreach FTTP 3300/330 or 3300/3300 service?
AAISP
CerberusISP
UnchainedISP
Aquiss
Zen
BT
Plusnet
Sky
EE
TalkTalk
Freeola
IDnet
File Sanctuary
A lot of these you’ve mentioned are BT Wholesale. Given they can’t be bothered to even do 1200/1800 profiles I doubt you’ll hear much about 3300
Any ISP that goes through Zen wholesale will most likely have it, BT wholesale? nope, they cant even be bothered to sell 1.2Gbps or 1.8Gbps.
It won’t matter who sells it, as Openreach have to decide where to sell it!
AKA richer neighbourhoods in the bigger cities!
Enjoy!
Oh aren’t the Alts there already?
No longer:
I dont understand what you mean. Openreach have over 20 million lines they can market this to. I live in a town of 30,000 people and we can get FTTP from Openreach. Yes there are small towns that dont get FTTP but 8/10 people can get full fibre now. Openreach wont decide ‘who’ can get this – every Openreach line will eventually get it, quite quickly i suspect if ordered by a customer. Thats over 20 million premises.
@K It will only be available in areas that have been upgraded to XGS-PON, nearly all of Openreach’s fibre network is GPON which won’t support these speeds. No idea what OR’s plan is but I imagine they won’t be in a hurry to upgrade the network having just invested so much. Not offering a multi-gig product is probably not going to cost them many customers for the foreseeable future. My guess would be they’ll upgrade areas when congestion on GPON starts affecting service performance.
john_r:
Is it not more likely they will upgrade it when a customer orders it? Thats what they do with 1.6gbit.
@K Doubtful as the upgrade to XGS-PON needs new equipment to be installed at the exchange. If they are swapping ONTs for the 1.6 Gbit/s service it will be to upgrade the ethernet port otherwise you would be limited to 900 Mbit/s or so – the fibre side of it is still the same tech.
Most of the investment is reusable for XGSPON. Adtran equipment since late 2023 or early 2024 needs at most transceiver change and the Nokia stuff at most new line cards.
Cost of new line cards and transceivers compared with getting the fibre to properties to begin with pretty low and they’ll be wanting to get rid of the Huawei OLTs providing FTTP.
Complicated bit is more how to smoothly keep customers connected to their provider when moving chassis as can’t see them providing XGSPON on the Huawei, ECI they can’t.
For avoidence of doubt, Openreach has been using olt combopon for a while now, supporting both xgs-pon and gpon. the trancievers are available on such sites as fs dot com
As for availalbilty of 1200mbits and 1800mbits this dependent on the cablelinks beyond the olt. some are still 1gbit cablelinks. To support the 1200/1800 services you need to install the 10gbits cablelinks
to have xgs pon the isps must also support it, and that has been the delay
Does anyone have any clue as to how you would go about trying to get onto this pilot?
I thought it was for Guildford area only, going by previous news posts. Someone correct this if i am wrong.
is there a reason ONTs cant be posted to consumers to plug in themselves?
It’s partly because of issues around safety, with users needing to handle a delicate cable that is outputting focused laser light (even it not really powerful enough to do serious damage).
They have to be commissioned and they don’t trust people not to get the fibre dirty, damage the cable, spend an age looking down it trying to find the Internet, mess up the commissioning or otherwise not complete the process properly.
XGSPON has slightly different characteristics to GPON as well so some installs that have been perfect with GPON will struggle.
Mostly catering for the stupid, though.
@fanny adams that’s some amazing mental gymnastics you’re pulling to believe that BT’s customer losses are ‘disguised by continuous roll out of FTTP”. On the one hand, BT report their line losses to the city every quarter, so if they’re disguising that, they’re doing a terrible job as it’s having a major negative drag on their share price! On the other hand, BT is managing to maintain a 38% take-up rate on FTTP DEPITE the adding over a million homes to the footprint every quarter. That’s also reported by them very openly – so this ‘disguising’ you’re on about must be truly shambolic!
Looks like OR are finally introducing products that will compete with the ALTNETS.
3Gbps up
120Mbps down
what a joke