ISP EE UK Launch 2.3Gbps and 8Gbps Broadband and Confirm Prices
Mobile and internet provider EE (BT) has today confirmed our earlier leak (here) by officially launching their Advanced Full Fibre Broadband packages, offering downloading speeds of 2.3Gbps and 8Gbps to new UK customers. But availability remains limited to the Guilford, Woking and surrounding areas, although this is due to “expand further in the near future“.
At launch EE claims this makes them the “first major UK provider to offer broadband speeds of up to 8Gbps on next-generation XGS-PON technology“, although this is perhaps debatable given how Netomnia’s rival network has been offering similar speeds to 3 million premises via YouFibre for several years – a wider availability than EE’s trial. But the latter network only has 500,000 customers, so it’s perhaps not quite “major” enough.
The trial (here and here) service is also based on Openreach’s ongoing pilot of their new XGS-PON powered Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, which isn’t yet strictly available as a full commercial product (i.e. EE’s service is more like an open beta). But the ISP has managed to price it in a fairly attractive way – the Advanced Full Fibre 2.3Gbps plan is available “from” £54.99 per month, and the 8Gbps plan goes from £74.99 per month on a 24-month term.
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The above prices are of course subject to EE’s mid-contract pricing policy, which increases the price you pay by +£4 a month in April each year. The upload speeds for their 2.3Gbps download tier are listed as 230Mbps, while we believe the uploads on their 8Gbps download package to be 800Mbps+ (advertised rates). Openreach’s network can do symmetric speeds too, but those tiers seem to be more intended for future premium business plans.
Luciano Oliveira, Director of Product, Home and TV at EE, said:
“Today marks a major milestone for EE as we become the first major UK provider to offer broadband speeds of up to 8Gbps on next-generation XGS-PON technology. As homes become more connected and customers place greater demands on their broadband, we’re investing in the technologies that will power the next generation of digital experiences.
Advanced Full Fibre combines exceptional speed, reliability and capacity, giving customers the confidence to do more online today while being ready for whatever comes next. We’re delighted that households in Guildford, Woking and the surrounding areas are the first to benefit, and we look forward to bringing this capability to more homes across the UK.”
Just to be clear, when EE talks about “surrounding areas” they mean Brookwood, Puttenham, Clandon, Shere and Worplesdon. Otherwise, eligible customers are being told they can sign up on this page – https://ee.co.uk/broadband/advanced-full-fibre, which currently only seems to be a sort of “register your interest” style form.
Somewhat confusingly that form then asks whether “you [are] an existing BT or EE customer?” and the option for ‘Yes‘ states: “Only available to new customers, provide account number below“. So we assume existing customers can sign up but not yet take the new service, even though existing customers are already on EE’s trial.
EE’s goal here seems to be to try and attract a wider base of users for testing before they fully integrate the new packages for a full national launch, hence our remark about this feeling more like an open beta product. Anybody taking part will also require an engineer visit to install one Openreach’s latest 10Gbps capable Optical Network Terminals (ONT).
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Customers on the 2.3Gbps tier will also receive EE’s existing Smart Hub 7 Pro router, although those opting for the top 8Gbps package will probably continue to receive a temporary router – currently from TP Link. The final Smart Hub product for 8Gbps customers is currently, we’re told (sources), still a few months away from being ready for launch.
Finally, Openreach’s XGS-PON trial has also been available to other ISPs since 23rd March 2026 (details), but EE is still the only ISP known to be involved. Part of that may stem from the difficulty that ISPs will have in adapting for the capacity demands of such products, which isn’t helped by the fact that Openreach aren’t currently expected to trial their new 100Gbps Cablelink solution until 2027 (here).
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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8Gb for £75 is a lot more competitive than I was expecting
Do you think? Netomnia offer it at £99.99, but it’s symmetric. It’s a shame to see Openreach *finally* start to roll out XGS-PON, but keeping the legacy 10:1 asynchronous speeds. All they’ve done is ensure I (and many others) stay firmly on the AltNets. EE’s 2.3Gb pricing is odd, too. YouFibre are half that price including a static IP, and again — symmetric! It’s a “No” from me. It’s a shame, as it would have been nice to have the option. I have an Openreach ONT gathering dust on my wall since YouFibre rolled out.
Rainmaker – if Netomnia were still rolling out here it’d be an option. They seemingly stopped after doing the pole-fed premises and with VM/Netomnia tie up I’m guessing it’ll never get finished and i’m stuck with BT or VM RFoG @1gig. If BT get here before Netomnia do, and it’s the only way to get more than 110 up – one of these two speeds is realistically the only option.
800mbit up would still be a nice upgrade, and its cheaper than the product I’ve been waiting to buy… Sometimes you have to compromise 😛
Coming in *cheaper* than YF (albeit not symmetric) is still going to be a problem I think. I was expecting this to be £125-150+
Yet another EE product that’s available to new customers only…
New customers in certain areas – yes
Do you want it?
What on earth would you do with 8Gb?
More for small business than home users, even 2.3 is far more than, I will say the majority of people will require or be able to make use of.
2300Mb/s both ways on Zzoomm, £39 a month on a 12 month contract, £35 on a 24 month, no increases. Not that I would want it, I don’t have the equipment to take advantage of it anyway, but they offered it to me for that prices as well.
@Ad47uk Yes! 10Gb WAN (~8Gb usable) with a 10Gb core switching fabric feeding 2.5Gb access switches (preferably over SFP+ uplink) is a sweet spot. Servers/NAS/downloaders/ingesters get to stretch their legs (SFP+ switches are getting cheap), and regular human clients/IoT devices have effectively uncontended wirespeed at their individual 2.5/1 Gbe copper ports. Top-down/cascade design minimises bufferbloat, and leaves the bottleneck on the edge router’s egress where it belongs (and can be managed). With commodity/SMB store-and-forward switching, any (rare) 10G -> 1G bottleneck (i.e. a client downloading large datasets *from* a NAS instead of backing up *to* it) is managed by regular TCP window scaling and only affects that host, not the whole topology. It’s where my money goes. While a ‘balanced’ setup (2G WAN -> 2.5G LAN or 1G WAN -> 1G LAN, with SQM at the edge) works, a cascade setup gives the ultimate breathing space for busy homes, homelabs or SMB/enterprise setups. You pays your money and you makes your choice.
Another news article, another daily update from Adrian on the services he doesn’t want to buy
Still asymmetric?! I know the usual suspects will say few people care about upload speed blah blah. But unlike earlier technologies the upstream capacity is inherently available so comes at no extra expense to Openreach. So why not make it available to those that do want it? It’s likely to make the product a lot more attractive to the kind of people willing to pay out for 8 Gb/s service.
Because you can then sell symmetric as a business product for more money ? 🙂
Again, crippled upload speeds for that tier. If you ahev a busy household with multiple devices, gaming stations, cloud uploads. Lets hope Cityfibre and Nexfibre are the operators offering proper symmetric which will continue to pile pressure on BT/Openreach. Too much, too long has been about Business for BT. If they don’t want residential, spin it out to someone who does. These upload rates are not even half the line rate. Aproper business wouldn’t even use residential fibre anyway because SLAs are too poor, so the excuse of business is laughable. Also their roll out avoided most business premises where they could.