ISP EE UK Launch 2.3Gbps and 8Gbps Broadband and Confirm Prices UPDATE
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 Guildford, 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).
UPDATE 1:53pm
EE has informed ISPreview that they’ll be able to accept existing customers on to the new plans “over the coming weeks“.
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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+
@matt
Netonmia and Vm will become one- also VM are rolling out XGS-PON to HFC areas, and for some people it’s live for ordering – so keep an eye out.
Anyone else noticed YF have gone from 30 days/12 months to 30 days/24 month contracts? That’a bit sneaky. When brsk died they stuck with 12 months. are they panicing?
@simon – I know. I would have rather be on the netomnia part of the network pre-merge though 😀
re@ VM – I’m not in a HFC area, I’m in an RFoG area so there’s already FTTP from their network terminated at my house. I was with VM and it was garbage in comparison to BT from a usability POV. Latency was significantly worse, peering to things like spotify or anyone using Fastly as a CDN was hot garbage.
re: YF – they went from 18mo to 12mo, I suspect moving to 24 is to align with VM / ensure the customer base is reasonably solid and committed for the merger. So I don’t think panic, just VM alignment.
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
@Rainmaker
Lots of word salad, and no services or usage that can’t be done on a 1g or 2.5g setup with £8 or £20 switches off amazon.
How many bedrooms and people in your house? 2? 3?
Running benchmarks is fine, but gets boring after the third time.
Zero *need* for 10g into a home other than running speedtest on a device that consumes a few 10s of GB a day.
@themoaner on Zooooom
I have it- it’s overkill fo rme. I will be going back to 2Gbps once the contract is up – which is 2.3Gbps each way for £30 a month on a 12 month contract – Zooooom are a rip off.
So yeah.
@RainmakerRaw, fair enough.
@Jonny, I wonder how many people on here comment on articles for services they don;t want to buy? So you have never done it and if you say no, I will say, Bull.
@simon, not moaning, just saying, 2.3Gbps each way for £30 a month is the cheapest around here, in fact it is the only way you will get it around here. I don’t know where you will get it cheaper, but if you think it is a rip-off, then god knows what the others are.
Not that I care, I am fine with what I have, I did think about reducing the speed to 200Mb/s, contract ends in a couple of weeks or so. But going down would have saved me £3 a month, saying that going to 1Gb/s would still be less than what I am paying now.
But really no point.
i stream, download some files and upload files, plus some browsing and that is it.
Just intrigued why some people feel like they need super duper fast broadband. io know of somone who went for 2Gb/s not because they needed it, but because they wanted the fastest they could get. Their words, like somone who want to get a sports car to shows off. Not that you can show off with broadband, unless you are on a forum I suppose.
Yes, I am nosy, so what?:)
Yes I want it.
I will need to upgrade some of my kit to take full advantage of it, but why not?
It’s priced much better than I expected (although still expensive).
@Ad47uk
Firstly who are you to decide what people need or want secondly you always complain about stuff like this people can choose to get whatever speed tier they simply desire their money their choice you alway complain about what people need and don’t need then make argument about the price of your current isps symmetrical speed tier that you can’t afford it? At very least you make seem that its too pricey for you and you want go down tier because its cheaper are you worried that if everyone goes on maximum speed tiers of whatever isp its gonna bog up the CBT or something
@YIDDISHPICKLE42, if people want it, that is up to them, want is different to need. But again it is up to them. I am just nosey and wonder what people do with those speeds.
I have the money to go to the top tier, but I don’t need it and if I can save money I will, only idols or people with more money than sense will pay more than they have to. Sorry to be blunt.
Would you get out and pay £500for a washing machine when you can get one that does the same thing, with the same features and same quality for £100 less? Maybe you would. Myself I would not pay £500 for a washing machine because I can get a machine that does what I need cheaper. I can get Beko for £23, that wash and spins, what else do I need? I do have a Beko, had it for over 7 years now, still works fine.
But someone who may use their machine every day and have a houseful of kids may want something that is better and can take more pounding. Saying that I saw a £1400 Miele a couple of years ago that fell apart after a few months.
So I understand that some people want a fast broadband connection due to people in house and what they use the connection for.
Not worried about the CBT being bogged up, I am not on an openreach network. Also, I doubt if anyone connected to my CBT or the Openreach one on the same pole would be using enough to bog them down.
Just intrigued as I said above, I presume you know what that word means.
It is interesting to see what people use the network for and what they find to do with their super-duper speed that they can’t do with a slower speed, or maybe they can do, but they don’t think they can.
GG post may hit the mark in that respect.
Whatever.
@GG
> Lots of word salad, and no services or usage that can’t be done on a 1g or 2.5g setup with £8 or £20 switches off amazon.
If you didn’t understand it, you didn’t need to reply. Also, the original question was whether anyone *wants* it; only you conflated it to *need*. You don’t need a car (much less a >30 horsepower one), or a house instead of a hut. You don’t *need* more than 1 Mbps, though I suppose 10 Mbps would be a bit nicer these days. A £2 10/100 megabit hub will do you just fine, no need for fancy £8 gigabit new-fangled switches. Though, do you even need the Internet?
*Need* leaves us with two walking legs, gruel and water. Some of us like nice things, and what areas we focus on those nice things tends to differ. Just because *you* don’t understand or have a use-case for decent networking, it doesn’t mean that applies to everyone. I don’t need fancy gardening equipment, a motorcycle or scuba gear — but I don’t tell those who like to ride across Europe that they only need a bicycle!
@GG, it makes them happy.
A mate, well, kind of mate, made a router using a mini PC, I wondered why, since you can get good ones off the self. His reply was because he wanted to, and it teaches him how they work.
My network here is not perfect, I have 4 switches, but it works fine and no, none of them are connected into each other, just in case anyone asked. I only have 1Gbit network, I sometimes wish the main Nas was a bit faster, but I doubt putting a faster network in would make much of a difference in practice.
@ad47uk
yes – Because a £500 machine is likely to be a heat pump model – and its just like a normal printer va a tank one – you pay more upfront but save more in the long run.
In fact my £600 tumble dryer is so good it uses 482wh to do a 10KG load – yes you read that right. I can ( and have) run it on a 200ah battery and 2000W inverter (525w but 1045 spike to get the heat pump going)
Not this 3.3KW constant crap. Handy!
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 ? 🙂
But businesses can’t buy these domestic tiers anyhow, quite easy to tell OR not to install them at a non-domestic address. It’s just a corner of the org that is still using spreadsheet models from the late 90s to price and market products.
The business side of BT is just awful to deal with as a business. Most of the people are lovely, but their policies and organisation is just dire. A real shame as the technology is always great.
BT/EE/whatever just need to jettison all of the legacy rubbish and cut the blockers between the customer and technology. I don’t want to pay for 8 layers of corporate bureaucracy when 1 would be sufficient.
They used the EE brand to try to break that lecacy, but it’s just been absorbed into the blob and is indistinguishable now.
Sorry John, but most people don’t care about symmetrical speeds, I wonder how many know what it means. I find it useful, but it is not something I looked for, but then I did not look for FTTP.
For most people they download, download and download. Maybe content creators or those that upload to cloud services will find faster upload speeds good.
@Ad47uk you don’t care about you. you are not the majority so you shouldn’t speak for the majority of people who may or may not
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.
its still in trial and as a guess they might go down the route virgin did ( from memory ) ie an extra £5pm for symetrical, which if so would still be £20pm cheaper then youfibre pm is
Most people don’t care.
If you are uploading large files, then do it over night. I used to on FTTC. But I doubt that many people unless they are creators send very large files anywhere. Oh yeah, a friend of mine used to send Photoshop and other Adobe files, but they are not that large.
Try sending a 4 minute song complete with all the separate samples to be put back into cool edit pro via ADSL. LOL
@Adrian.
Dude, try downloading stuff on dialup. ADSL, lol don’t know yer born.
Ad47uk:
Yes most people dont upload large files, but with speeds like this people WILL start sending large files. eg. At the minute few people email large video files in 4k taken with a video camera or phone, but with this they now will. This is an enabling technology that people and developers will use once its commonplace. How many people do you know have sent you their family video library? None because the internet is too slow. Now they can think about it at least. Time will tell.
K hits it on the head as an example there. If you are uploading stuff to you tube or similar or work in media, you want that upload speed. If you are backing up iTunes downloaded films or tv shows or music or have large uncompressed raw photos to cloud storage, you want the upload. Office 365 has 1tb per user and on family package that’s 6tb total on one subscription.
It’s moved from static web pages and text emails. Just because some people dont use upload much does not mean everyone. The average person is banded around a lot. The average person could use FTTC abd before that ADSL we were told. Just have good products and not dumbed down in belief of average user. It might be average because people couldn’t do things before. BT were hell bent on brlow 1gbps speeds originally saying 330mbps was fast enough for full fibre hence the early profiles of max 330mbps, but here we are entering multi gig and a sloooooww increase on upload speeds. Not do average then after all if uou keep having to increase!!!!!!
@Cognizant. Been there, done that, LOL. Granted files were smaller than.
I had a computer in my bedroom with a modem, my lodger had a computer in her room and I had mine in the living room,all connected via coax Ethernet and used internet connection sharing. So two of us sharing a dial-up connection :).
Worked okay, just changed the dial-up modem to the ADSL frog modem when we went ADSL.
I think the internet was more fun those days.
Well this move has just forced Youfibre to drop their 8Gbps service by £49 a month – so it’s very very good!
@FANNY ADAMS, the average person is banded around a lot because that is what things are based on. Yes, some people may find the use for faster upload speeds. Most Full fibre packages will have faster upload speed than FTTC anyway.
So what if MS have 1TB storage per user? It don’t matter if it was 10TB per user, I doubt very much if many people are going to send 1TB up at any one time. People will normally do it in when there is a need to. There will always be one that will send a load up at the same time.
Also, 1TB of storage is a paid for service with MS Office, so I doubt your average home user will use it. Home users are getting smarter and using some of the free office suites out there for home use.
ADSL would be too slow for most people, I found it too slow in 2012, which is why I went for a Wireless network. If I could have got ADSL at the full speed it is capable off then maybe I would not have bothered.
But these days, ADSL even at full speed is too slow.
If you can get onto a network that has symmetric connection, then go for it, but don’t let that be the only reason.
ad47 see K’s comment. It’s VERY valid even fir average users as many people got office 365, not necessarily for Office, but because cloud storage is the cheapest way to get it for that amount for the family and backs up photos and videos. Photos can now be taken uncompressed on camera phones, and video can be 4k. Tada! Kerching!
Also Altnets didn’t seem to rush to the bottom in perceived average user requirements. Nope most thought of future proofing and offered symmetric.
@K agreed
My 16 pro Max will upload at full speed – Pro res videos go up mighty fast at 8Gbps!
Meanwhile, I’m stuck with 1-3mbps down & 300kbps upload on a good day… With no fibre install date now CityFibre have relinquished the contracts
As with everything, the already monstrously rich (1gbps)… get richer
@Chris, that is naff, so you still on ADSL? Would a mobile service be better?
5G or Starlink dude – 5G or Starlink
You spelt Guildford wrong, Mark. Regards
all in all its good news ie speeds go up, prices come down. ee have already started doing the 150mb+500mb for the same price ( so anyone would be silly not to go for 500mb ) and no doubt the 150mb+500mb will prob be phased out and the entry speed will be 900mb. seem to remember that when the ee 1.6gb started it was around the £75pm mark also, its now around £40pm ( cheaper for new customers on a switch site )
You say they are the same price, but for how long?
Scratch that,I had a look and the price rise the same on both packages.
The thing is when they take the lower option away they increase the price somewhere.
I was told a while back, that the speed is not the cost, it is the data, so all providers could in theory stick us all onto 1Gb/s for the same price as say 150Mb/s and hope that most of us don’t go crazy and to be honest, it would probably work.
My router currently is flicking between 4Kbps to 900Kbs download and upload 4 to 190Kbs and will do that for a lot of the day and I expect 99% of the houses in this street does more or less the same thing.
It is normally in the evbening when people will start using it for streaming,. I just for a nose, put on ITV on my Tv and streamed. 74Mb/s max and that was not stable, it was going down to 1Mb/s or less now and again.
So me using the full 500Mb/s I can acess is goiong to be few and far between.
Yes, I know other house holds are different if they got game consoles and a few people streaming at the same time, but what I am trying to pint out is that the network is going to running on idle for most of the time.
so providers can in thoery give us all superduper speeds for the same price as the slower speeds and hope we don’t go crazy.
I used to like Metronet in the ADSL days, pay a lower price to acess the service, plus some data allowence and then pay for more data allowence. It worked out well for me. I doubt it would now, different days. I do miss those days.
Anyway, drunk coffee, now got some work to do.
“. 74Mb/s max and that was not stable, it was going down to 1Mb/s or less now and again.”
Yes – this is how buffering works! – your machine will buffer to a point stop and rinse and repeat.
I’d love to get 8Gb, but once you get much above 1Gb you have to know to take a close look at the router you’re going to connect through, because whilst my UniFi Dream Machine could theoretically use one of its 10GbE capable SFP+ ports as the WAN connection, if I want to continue to use IDS/IPS security my throughput maxes out at 3.5Gb
Most consumer grade routers either won’t have the level of security or they will be similarly limited in throughput if security is enabled.
I would need to spend an additional one-off £1,500 for a UniFi router capable of up to 25Gb of throughput with security enabled.
Or you could just get a 25Gbps dual NIC for £96 and connect to the ONT
I am once again just asking for 1 gig symmetrical
I can get 1 Gb symmetric but I won’t buy from a cowboy outfit.
I really honest thought BTWholesale will lift 1000/220 to 1800/200 but it haven’t happen yet, probably they wait until EE become public sales for “2.3Gbps and 8Gbps but it won’t be on BTw.
It would be useful if OpenReach laid fibre to Hythe Marina
Youfibre just dropped 8Gbps to £50 a month AND have gone back to 24 month contracts. – this has got everyone shook up!
Yeah no, you’re welcome
Wow cheaper than I expected. Virgin constantly wants to charge me 85 a month, until I wrestle with cancellations, yet EE is offering 8x that speed for less money.
Another reminder that most providers are just robbing us blind. If only there was some form of organisation that was there to stop this…..
You forgot to mention the Altnets that offer symmetric products more cheaply, and in many cases no in contract price rises, and new customer pricing when renewing a contract. Not all offer all of these options, granted.
For example, You Fibre, 8gbps SYMMETRIC can now be had for £50 a month – much cheaper than EE package with WiFi7 routers supplied. And at least Virgin Media offer a symmetric add-on that isn’t too expensive i.e. a choice!.
There that’s put the record straight.
There is. I just used that very law to get this deal.
No law that forces them to offer the same price to existing customers. Holding you to the contract you agreed they can absolutely do. Changing the contract a different matter.
So Openreach’s XGS-PON won’t offer symmetrical speeds for residential customers and Virgin Media make you pay extra for symmetrical speeds.
Altnets still the superior offering.
where available as openreach and virgin cover the majority. the good thing is that it looks like on the back of this youfibre’s 8gb package is now reduced to £50pm from £99pm
Whilst its good the company is progressing on tech, what stopped them from waiting till they had reasonable coverage? its basically just a few towns. In effect its not available.
I don’t think it’s actually available via the normal order process yet, so even people in the eligible areas still have to register their interest and then wait to be contacted to place an order. The Advanced Full Fibre page linked in the article says “New customers in Guildford, Woking and surrounding areas, can register their interest… We’ll be in touch if you’re eligible to place an order.”
Its probably because you need an Openreach engineer to come to your home and swap the ONT. If Openreach have millions of customers it will take a long time if hundreds of thousands of customers wanted to upgrade! Thats hundreds of thousands appointments for Openreach.
I guess it’s because it’s not available to every property in the catchment areas.