The Curious Case of Openreach’s Vanishing UK FTTP Broadband Coverage

Independent data analysis has recently revealed a curious trend where patches of Openreach’s full fibre (FTTP) broadband network, often within urban areas and usually but not always associated to installs that require a more complex stage 2 process, suddenly vanish after somebody places an order. The issue is estimated to be impacting 0.3% of UK premises.

Regular readers will know that there are already various reasons why areas that have already gone live with FTTP may suddenly, albeit temporarily, cease to be available. For example, availability can be impacted if the local distribution nodes (e.g. Connectorised Block Terminals / CBT) run out of spare ports or nearby telecoms poles have no space for new cables. This often causes a delay in availability until engineers can deploy a solution, albeit usually only for a very small area (e.g. one side of a street or a handful of homes).

However, the cases we’re looking at today concern a different issue or set of issues, which can often impact a wider area (e.g. several streets or postcodes). The problem, which was picked up by Andrew Ferguson over at Thinkbroadband (here, here, here and here), concerns areas where Openreach have deployed FTTP, but then latter identify additional complexities after somebody places an order.

Often these will be areas that have already been designated as falling under a stage 2 (KCI2) installation process. Just for context, a stage 1 process tends to reflect a normal property that is expected to be installed within a single engineering visit, while stage 2 usually reflects those that are expected to be more complex (i.e. may require additional external engineering work before a connection can be made to the inside of the property).

During stage 2 installs, engineers may also come across various often unexpected issues, such as cable ducts that are blocked or don’t exist (e.g. the cable may be directly buried in the ground). Properties marked as stage 2 are usually considered to be covered if Openreach have built their FTTP network to the area, but that last little hop into homes can still throw up problems. In some cases this has been causing Openreach to remove some sizeable patches of coverage from areas where the service was previously marked as “available” (RFS).

A Spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:

“We’ve temporarily paused new Full Fibre orders at a small number of previously enabled premises as we don’t want customers there to face long delays when they order. These particular locations have proved more complex to connect than a typical order, so we’re taking a closer look at the reasons for that to make sure we can give people the right service experience from day one. Existing customers and inflight orders aren’t affected, and we’ve already made some paused locations available again. We plan to the remainder as quickly as possible.”

Openreach are certainly not the only network operator to run into this sort of problem, although until recently it wasn’t really possible to get a feel for how much of an impact it was having. However, Andrew’s recent mapping efforts have changed that, which has increasingly identified areas across the UK where the operator’s FTTP coverage figures have been going backwards. Andrew said: “We’ve had plenty of networks where everything says yes and they’ll actually take peoples money to then find out a street has been removed from footprint.”

For example, over in Plymouth (Devon) it was identified that this issue had recently resulted in full fibre coverage dropping from a peak of 80.21% to 79.15% (a reduction of c.1,300 premises), which has created islands of vanishing availability within the city. But nationally, Thinkbroadband estimates that it may only impact around 0.3% of UK premises, although it’s not clear how long it usually takes for operators to resolve such issues and Andrew is still working to fully map the impacted areas.

Suffice to say, full fibre coverage is turning out to be a bit more dynamic than we originally expected, although the above challenges should perhaps be considered par for the course on any network that’s still in the process of building.