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).
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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).
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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I thought about 8gbps through YouFibre but know I will never use that capacity so sticking with 2gbps.
Also most of the house is still on 2.5gbe with only a few devices on 10g fibre.
It’s not that great – seen people getting 4-5 most of the time. I’d rather wait and have it on BT but that’s just me
Never saw below 7 despite sharing the port with over 50 other customers. The subreddit points to most people getting similar. 4-5 sounds like a local or speed test server problem.
@SImon – not that great in what way? I can tell you first hand, it is amazing. Have you used it? I’d hazard a guess those with the slower speeds are using underpowered consumer kit which cannot cope with the speeds properly. I’ve tried some of this over the years and it has always caused issues. Use proper kit and it flies.
Hard to believe you would never experience reduced speeds when your connection can use 80% of the available shared bandwidth. I guess it’s highly dependent on the usage patterns of your neighbours but if I bought that package I wouldn’t buy it expecting to get those speeds all the time especially not in peak hours.
@john_r it does drop sometimes….but not “most of the time” as the other dude said, that is misleading people.
@safcbee
Yes.I am on it right now. It’s since settled down to give me around the speeds. There were many issues at their end their NOC sorted. I get 7600 up and down on their server and on others about 7 down and 7.5 up
This site’s speed tester can’t cope (I assume it’s a TBB one as that can’t cope either) – or else I would put a test up (I tried just before I posted this)
Why are the packages are not symmetric on XGS-PON?
To protect more lucrative revenue streams on leased lines?
htmm:
They are offering different bands of upload speeds including symmetric up to 3.3gbit, eventually (and hopefully) a symmetric 8.5 in the future.
Maybe it’s partly to protect their leased line business but also maybe to stop people sticking an internet server on a domestic connection that constantly maxes out the PON although it doesn’t seem to have been a problem for the altnets that offer this service.
LOL
“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.”
…..amd way behind ALTNETS who have been deploying XGS-PON (or better) for past few years! Also, Virgin Media’s NexFibre was even deploying XGS-PON, and VM in areas where they are upgrading coax/HFC to FTTP is using XGS-PON.
Usual spin from BT pretending they are pioneering, when in reality, way behind and still deploying GPON as of today to areas that are not the XGS-PON ***TRIAL*** area.
Welcome to public relations. Positive spins are the point.
Anything untrue about the quote that XGSPON is a meaningful upgrade to the Openreach network or the rest of the quote here?
People like to glaze ALTNETS but in reality apart from them using XGS-PON (or better) which OP can upgrade to eventually, and competitive prices, everything else is worse unfortunately.
Go have a look at the Community Fibre reddit, DNS servers go down regularly, the actual connection drops out too (much more than Openreach who are super reliable), they use crappy things like CG-NAT unlike BT/EE/Plusnet/Sky/Virgin, their Support is rubbish, and their stock routers are trash, the Pro Hub from EE is actually a very powerful bit of kit.
Agree and disagree with some of your points Tony. Yes, BT have more engineers as been around longer and have potential to fix faults more quickly. We are agreed on this.
CGNAT is got around by paying small amount extra for a fixed IP address with most ALTNETS.
DNS – I never use ISP DNS, as prefer DNS over TLS and DNSSec. Don’t have to use ISP DNS and a good router allows easy changing of it, even if you don’t use DNS over TLS or DNSSec as extra complexity.
Stock Routers – BT’s are rubbish like most ISP’s – parents get sent them from BT/EE/Plus.net when they renewed contracts, but pitifully woeful in functionality and get swapped out. Some Altnets like YouFibre were supplying EERO routers and they were pretty decent for an ISP router. They’ve changed now admittedly and not sure what the new one is like but it is WIFI 7 capable.
Support is rubbish from any ISP generally unless Zen or A&A (i.e. one known for it’s support).
How many of these pioneering altnets are happy to deploy CGNAT or bother to much about the resilience of their networks though?
Some altnets can’t even seem to deploy IPv6 (or keep it working). The two prime movers behind UK IPv6 mass deployment are BT and Sky with their respective legacy issues. Greenfield operators should have had it up and running from day one. So I’m not sure I’d agree that altnets are doing much to push the state of the art ever forward.
If everyone binned the ISP routers as you suggest, the major ISPs wouldn’t spend so much time and effort getting units custom-designed to their own requirements.
Been working fine on our YouFibre connection.
Unlike non-existent on BT’s Plus.net at parents.
Fake news, Ivor, move along….. 🙂
@Fanny
It’s a Sagencomm one – bit silly it’s got 10Gbps WAN and 10Gbps LAN and then 4 poncy 1Gbps ports!
I left AA as I found their suport to be meh at best, twice when I called for an update It felt like the person just didn’t care -so I jumped to Youfibre too
Who the hell needs 8Gb/s? I’ve worked for SMBs that don’t even use anything like that.
It’s on a par with the greasy car salesman selling you a 180mph Farrari. Way more than you need and probably way more than you’ll ever get to use!
It’s important to me that I never have to wait for anything for any reason, including downloading files. Though I have 1.8Gbps down and sometimes servers can’t provide that much.
Anyone know what contention ratio they are using on this trial? They use 32:1 on GPON but most of the altnets seem to use 64:1.
It’s all 32:1 on Openreach, they used to use dual split but that has the same contention . It’s only the exchange equipment being upgraded.
Don’t confuse contention ratios with PON split ratios. They might sound similar but are very different things
That’s because newer stuff like XGS-PON can support higher ratio more easily then legacy GPON can. It’s still way within spec for XGS-PON.
Not really. Not so much about GPON or XGSPON, mostly about the optics and the vendors. Can go to 1:128 on GPON if you really want to.
What is ‘dual split’ Peach?
The provision of a TP Link router is pretty poor.
The TP Link End User license agreement and potential for misuse of data associated with TP Link routers has previously raised as an issue.
The USA Federal Communications Commission recently announced a ban on all foreign made routers (including TP link) citing security vulnerabilities and the potential for the router data traffic to be hijacked by third parties.
Don’t be fooled by the spin the US ban has nothing to do with security. Andy Sayle from Zen Internet did a bit about it this week on his blog.
https://open.substack.com/pub/andysayle/p/the-us-just-banned-foreign-routers?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=6sfjb0
On tp-link router. Most likely base on this one aka what Tim use in Italy for their 10GB XGS-PON service. I sign up for it last year on our 2nd villa. The WiFi signal is very very good. Got ASUS GT-BE19000AI connected to it as well using PPPAOE connection.
https://www.tp-link.com/nordic/service-provider/gpon/xgb830v/#overview
Unlikely as they’re using a separate ONT, no point paying for fibre porta that will never be used.
I don’t understand the comments about not needing 8Gb/s. Other counties have had faster speed for years at a cheaper price. I feel this is just playing catch up. Just because it will be available doesn’t mean you need to have it. I say look at the good side. the lower speeds will increase so might be able to downgrade package and save instead. I have already saved on 900 speed due to the 1.6GB speed tier.
Cheaper, there you hit the nail on the head, I am surer more people would have faster speeds if it was cheaper, even if they don’t need it. I don’t need 500Mb/s, but the price difference between it and 200 is slim, if I was really watching the pennies, then yes I would go to a lower speed.
I agree about getting better tech and faster speeds, but BT is not going to do anything to take business away from their leased lines. No doubt they have already loss customers due to faster and cheaper fibre.
When people say why would anyone wants that speed, I think they should mean why would any need that speed? For a start hardware starts getting more expensive, £8 for a cheap 5 port 1Gb switch is, goes to above £100 for a 10Gb, cables get more difficult to run as you need higher grade ones. I use Cat 5E here because they are easy to run, could go for fibre network, but that is more cost. Don’t forget the hardware to take advantage. Getting a usb to 10Gb Ethernet adaptor for my Mac is around the £100, I should have got a Mac with it built-in, but you don’t think about these things.
After all of that, how often would they get full use of it, if they do?
Some people will get it because they think faster is better and then don’t have the hardware to make use of it.
As for having a choice, sure we have a choice of speeds, but if you want broadband these days you need fibre, like it or lump it, I had no interest in getting fibre. Now I have it, then yes, if my provider said they would stick me from 50Mb/s to a faster speed for the same price, I would say why not.
This is the U.K, we pay more for everything compared to some other countries.
As a long-time IT professional I get extremely frustrated reading about these impressive breakthroughs because at the same time at the other end of the scale they have given up trying to improve services for the unlucky rural customers. The MOST i can get with ANY major provider is 20mbps and I’m less than half a mile from a roadside fibre cabinet. They should be regulated to at least provide a minimum of 100mbps to ANY customer within a reasonable distance from their fibre infrastructure. I get they probably can’t lay a fibre cable to a remote farmhouse on the isle of skye or somewhere really remote but I’m a short walking distance from a fully fibre village.
Amen brother, described my situation verbatim. Frustrating times for sure! Saving grace is strong 5G but those “unlimited” fair use policies really hang over you…
Then spend £75 for Starlink and get 300-400 and no data limit.
Both of you
Hmm Maybe concentrate on getting everyone on a decent service first! Why 8gb when others can’t even get 8Mb including us. It’s hardly in the back of beyond either here
there adding 4million oremises per year for the last few years. sadly everyone wont be getting it anyways ie OR target is upto 30m premises by 2030, currently 33m premises. hence ee are in around 6 months going to be offering starlink ( its avaialble to register interest on th EE site )
I agree, but sadly if it is not cost effective it is not going to happen.
That is the problem with having companies take charge of our network, companies that all they want to do is make money. Which is fine, that is what they are there for, but allowing them control over the network was wrong when it happened and wrong now
It’s ok for a few to get that what about the people like myself who live in semi rural areas which can’t even get full fiber. We only got part fiber
Many altnets or Starlink.
EE bragging about their first 8 Gbps customer is embarrassing. Their network barely handles 200–500 Mbps on a single thread, making an 8 Gig download speed largely pointless when the peering is a shambles.
I’m lucky enough to have my pick of VM, BT, and CityFibre, but I’ve moved to IDNet’s 2.5 Gbps line. It is leaps and bounds ahead.
Notice how EE doesn’t brag about upload speeds matching that massive download? That’s a huge red flag. It’s not a limitation of the fibre technology; it’s a limitation of their infrastructure. Giant ISPs rely on Local Caching to survive.
Companies like Netflix, Google, Valve, and playstation/Xbox place physical appliances (Edge Nodes) directly inside the ISP’s network. Effectively, 70% to 90% of your traffic never leaves the ISP’s own LAN.
When you download a 150GB game or stream 4K video, you aren’t on the “wider internet”—you’re pulling data from a box down the road.
Uploads, however, cannot be cached. When you upload, that data must actually leave their network via external peering links. Because their peering capacity is so neglected, offering high upload speeds would instantly choke their transit providers.
They are betting on you staying within their “internal bubble.” If they gave everyone 8 Gbps upload, the latency for anyone trying to actually play a game or visit an external site would tank.
They mask this by prioritising traffic to Speedtest.net. If you want the truth, test using a single thread. Multi-threading just brute-forces clogged pipes and causes jitter for everyone else. Ideally do testing not using Netflix’s fast, or Speedtest, you want to test a server you know has the bandwidth, they isn’t run on these internal networks, or ones they have QoS priority.
People blame “contention ratios,” but that’s old-school thinking; modern fibre is so fast that street-level congestion is rarely the bottleneck.
The real bottleneck is the ISP’s backbone. If you can’t max out your connection on a single-thread test to a major London data centre, you are overpaying for an impacted service. While the big players struggle to hit max speeds across London, a provider like IDNet—with superior peering to the US and Japan—can pull nearly 1 Gbps single-threaded from across the Atlantic.
Do yourself a favour: ditch the cowboys. I’d take a rock-solid 1 Gbps line from a proper provider like IDNet over a “fake” 8 Gig line from a giant ISP any day.
In my case I am paying for 8Gbps and getting 2 – as they can’t seem to make my line go any faster.
You are right. I have a FTTP connection which has been rock solid for years with IDNET – I am going to jsut stuck with that I think
Imagine having little to no knowledge about the backbone network of the UK. EE/BT have the strongest largest capacity core network in the UK
Goodness me. So many words. So many of them wrong. How can you confidently write such nonsense?
“Imagine having little to no knowledge about the backbone network of the UK. EE/BT have the strongest largest capacity core network in the UK”
—all well and good, but if they use GPON and don’t provide symmetric, then it’s akin to a Ferrari capped at 40mph!
Other providers like Virgin Media have extensive links via fibre that are also used by 3rd parties, having swallowed Cable and Wireless years ago, and likewise, Vodafone have fibre links as well as various other dark fibre providers.
SIMON HAYTER:
So much hate towards BT/EE. My single threads are at 900mb and the reason why Openreach upload speed is slower is because the older hardware they use at the minute has a slower upload maximum, hence these incoming upgrades. If you look at the time you wrote your post (nearly 3am in the morning on a friday night) – were you full when you wrote this?.
This whole rant can best be summed up as, “SIMON the EE HAYTER”
aside from the sentence structure that gives massive LLM vibes, none of this is really true. There may be complaints to be had about EE/BT marketing and customer service, but at a purely technical level they are among the best. The BT 1G and EE 1.6G services I have access to seem to work just fine with single threaded traffic. It is more likely that the bottleneck is at the sender, not within BT’s network.
I would expect BT to have reasonable international performance as well. They’re not a tier1 peering operator but they still have a sizeable international IP network, which puts them above the vast majority of their competitors.
Ironically I did once have single thread performance issues with a “proper provider” (not IDnet). I wasn’t the only one, there was a long running thread over on the competing UK broadband forum about it. Took far too long to get fixed. That same line has never seen the problem occur while it has been with BT.
Interesting.
‘Notice how EE doesn’t brag about upload speeds matching that massive download? That’s a huge red flag. It’s not a limitation of the fibre technology’
It’s a limitation of that they only buy access from Openreach so are restricted by the products Openreach offer.
‘Effectively, 70% to 90% of your traffic never leaves the ISP’s own LAN.’
The ISP’s own *LAN*? You mean ‘network’ presumably. It makes a lot of difference, however it does have to be carried at least so far on the network, can’t put caches everywhere. Can’t steer all clients towards caches either. Some browsers break the caching by default now.
‘When you upload, that data must actually leave their network via external peering links. Because their peering capacity is so neglected, offering high upload speeds would instantly choke their transit providers.’
Doubtful. Usage ratio even when the access is symmetrical, which EE’s isn’t, is nowhere near the level where it’ll cause pressure relative to downstream. On the ‘giant’ ISPs especially the vast majority of traffic is downstream. BT have half a terabit to the LINX primary LAN, they have a ton of PNIs, they peer with over 200 networks, what do you consider acceptable?
BTW if peering is maxed out traffic doesn’t fail over to transit. The peering congests. Either you’re conflating peering and transit, they aren’t the same thing, or you thought there was a failover mechanism there that doesn’t actually exist.
‘They mask this by prioritising traffic to Speedtest.net.’
Citation needed given if they are doing this it’s a breach of net neutrality.
‘The real bottleneck is the ISP’s backbone.’
Thought it was ‘peering’? Peering is network edge not the backbone. You’re also wrong: it’s the links to get to the backbone that are the problem most of the time, the backhaul/transport network.
‘While the big players struggle to hit max speeds across London, a provider like IDNet—with superior peering to the US and Japan—can pull nearly 1 Gbps single-threaded from across the Atlantic.’
BT peer with more networks than IDNet. BT have superior peering to the US and Japan due to having more upstreams and more direct connectivity to every network. IDNet have no international peering. IDNet rely on 2 upstream networks to reach everything they don’t peer with. For any advantages they might have I am pretty sure IDNet wouldn’t claim to have superior peering relative to BT.
https://bgp.tools/as/12496#connectivity
https://bgp.tools/as/2856#connectivity
If what you say is true and BT’s network is so congested I assume speeds would improve overnight when traffic levels are lower, and slow down around early evening when people come online and the alleged network management you think is there kicks in to preserve speedtest.net. I’d also assume that BT/EE customers would be seeing latency to everything not prioritised increase. I can’t see a mass of reports of any of this. I would’ve thought at least a few of the millions of BT/EE FTTP customers would’ve noticed?
Mr Adams:
‘but if they use GPON and don’t provide symmetric’
BT/EE are retail providers. They use Openreach products. As far as I know they aren’t planning on installing their own fibre network and OLTs and they’re not likely to buy from Nexfibre or CityFibre so it’ll probably stay that way making it irrelevant.
‘Virgin Media have extensive links via fibre that are also used by 3rd parties, having swallowed Cable and Wireless years ago’
Virgin Media didn’t swallow Cable and Wireless. The bought the C&W cable network giving them the HFC assets. Vodafone bought the Cable and Wireless UK fibre assets. To be clear having fibre doesn’t mean tons of network capacity it means having fibre.
Either way it’s factual that BT/EE carry more data than any other retail brand with the network capacity to match. Of course they do: they’ve more customers than anyone else.
This is funny – because unless it’s changed – TBB’s speedtest server is on IDNET in London – and it craps out at 3Gbps both ways
300 great British pounds per month please! For a non symmetric connection!
Amazing achievement, how about letting some of get more than 36mbps speeds now?
Seeing articles like this will never not make me angry while they refuse to connect streets in cities surrounded by full fibre.