Broadband ISP EE Confirms First UK Customer Live on 8Gbps Broadband

The Director of Home and TV at BT, Luciano Oliveira, yesterday confirmed that broadband ISP EE had “connected its first customer to an 8Gbps full fibre service“, which he said made them the “first major ISP in the UK to reach this milestone” – obviously ignoring smaller players like Youfibre [Netomnia] and B4RN etc. that have done it for a while.

Just to recap. EE (BT) have recently been busy inviting existing customers to help trial Openreach’s new XGS-PON powered Full Fibre (FTTP) technology (here), which is capable of delivering internet download speeds of up to 8.5Gbps (850Mbps upload for consumer tiers and symmetric for premium business ones). The network operator’s pilot has been available to other ISPs too since 23rd March 2026 (details), but EE is currently the only one to promote their involvement in public.

The pilot is currently taking place across a limited area of around 40,000 premises in Guildford, neighbouring Woking and nearby locations like Brookwood, Puttenham, Clandon, Shere and Worplesdon (EE Trial Invite Page). Any EE customers taking part will require another engineer visit to install one of the operator’s latest 10G Optical Network Terminals (ONT) and those on the 8Gbps tier will also get an unspecified TP Link router (the final Smart Hub product for 8Gbps simply isn’t ready yet).

Further details on EE’s pilot can be found here, although we should add that customers on the slower 2.3Gbps trial will instead get the provider’s existing Smart Hub 7 Pro router.

Luciano Oliveira said:

“The technology behind it is XGS-PON: the first real-world deployment on Openreach’s national network, and a meaningful upgrade to the fibre architecture underpinning the UK’s entire FTTP rollout from BT Group.

The speed numbers are striking. 32x faster than the average UK home connection. A full HD film in under 10 seconds.

But speed isn’t the story. Headroom is.

The infrastructure handling today’s smart homes, hybrid working, and 4K streaming will be ready for what’s coming next: 8K, spatial computing, always-on AI running locally in the home.

We’re not building for today’s use cases. We’re laying foundations for ones we haven’t yet fully imagined.

The UK’s broadband story is still being written. This week, the ink moved fast.”

One thing to keep in mind here is that we don’t yet know how long Openreach’s wider pilot is going to run (it may be extended and expanded over time), before they introduce it and other new speed tiers as final commercial products for ISPs and consumers to harness.

However, it’s worth noting that Openreach are also preparing to trial a new 100G Cablelink Service Connect (GEA-CSC) product to help feed such lines with capacity (here), but this isn’t even expected to enter the trial phase until 2027 (they’ll use multiple 10Gbps Cablelinks for EE’s 8Gbps trial, but that won’t be ideal for the final product).