Openreach Says UK Full Fibre Broadband Usage Jumped 37 Percent in H1 2026
The Director of Network Technology at national UK broadband operator Openreach (BT), Trevor Linney, has today reported that “full fibre usage” – driven by live TV video streaming and new video game updates – across their network increased by 37% in the first half of 2026, compared with the same period last year.
“That tells us something important: people aren’t just using more data, they’re increasingly relying on Full Fibre to do more online, more reliably and with fewer frustrations. And it’s not hard to see why. Today’s typical households often have several people online at the same time – streaming, gaming, video calling, shopping or working. Full fibre is built for that world,” said Linney.
Sadly, we don’t get much context for that 37% figure (i.e. is it total data consumption, peak daily usage or something else), which makes it tricky to analyse in the correct context. But at the start of this year Openreach did report (here) that broadband usage across their UK network increased by the more expected figure of 4.8% in 2025 (down from 10.5% in 2024) to total 108,599 PetaBytes (PB) of data (up from 103,590PB). But at the same time, they said that data usage on their full fibre network had “exploded” by 40% in the prior year.
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The average Full Fibre customer on their network was previously also said to be chewing through 22.1GB (GigaBytes) a day, although they haven’t issued an updated figure on that today. Just for some extra context, Ofcom reported at the end of 2025 that the average monthly fixed broadband data usage per connection is now 583GB across “all technologies” (up from 531GB in 2024), which increased to an average of 738GB for full-fibre connections (oddly this was down a bit from 766GB).
Demand for data is of course constantly rising and broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time. But broadband ISPs often mitigate this somewhat by harnessing sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which cache popular content closer in the network to users (i.e. improves performance without adding strain, which also keeps costs down).
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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