Openreach’s CEO talks future broadband build, Ofcom’s discount block and competition

The CEO of UK ISP Zen Internet, Richard Tang, has conducted a new interview with the Openreach’s new CEO, Katie Milligan, which touches on everything from the stumbling blocks to expanding FTTP broadband to 30 million UK premises by 2030, to Ofcom’s block of a key fibre discount, the capacity problem facing the analogue phone switch-off and altnet competition.

The interview itself, which also covers the proposed nexfibre acquisition of Netomnia (note: it was done before the CMA provisionally moved to block that deal), doesn’t contain too many surprises. But there were a few interesting remarks that we’d like to highlight for our readers.

The first remark concerns Openreach’s build targets for their full fibre broadband network. At present the operator is aiming to reach 25 million premises by the end of December 2026, which Katie seemed confident would be achieved. At the present pace of build the operator is already approaching the c.24m mark and we think they’ll probably get to around 24.6m+ by the target, which will probably be close enough to call it a win.

However, a significant question mark remains over how far beyond 25m premises Openreach will go (toward reaching their next 30m target), which is something they’ve yet to answer. So far, no firm build plan has been released for reaching the second target, although internally they do have an idea because their engineering teams are still very busy beyond December 2026; and not just with Project Gigabit contracts (i.e. they have a commercial plan, it’s just not been shared in public).

Katie explains that before they can set out the plan for all this, they still need to make sure that certain challenges are resolved, such as with gaining access into buildings (MDUs), ensuring related permissions aren’t overly onerous and making sure Ofcom are truly maintaining the Fair Bet principle so they can compete.

In addition, she also briefly mentions government taxation, albeit without elaborating on precisely what they want (business rates probably play a role). On the MDU access issue, we know the government are working on a solution, but that has yet to be set out in its final form.

On Ofcom and the Fair Bet, the regulator’s recent rejection of a special FTTP discount doesn’t appear to have dampened Openreach’s enthusiasm. Instead, Katie said they now have a better idea of Ofcom’s thinking, after the regulator approved the remaining offers: “We can compete fairly with sustainable long-term competitors and that is actually some of the deals that have gone through. So that was a key one for us. But we’ll continue to look at it.”

The interview also touched on nexfibre’s proposed acquisition of Netomnia, although as above this appears to have been debated before the CMA provisionally moved to effectively block the deal. “We model this to death. Everyday we’ve got a different view on it, but we actually don’t get a say in it and it will play out one of two ways, let’s see which way it is,” said Katie.

“We’ll then have to work out if it is going to be the Virgin Media piece, are they going to wholesale it or not, that will determine how we view it. In that sense, Virgin are our long-standing competition, so we’ll be able to compete fairly and hard against them, so we can do that. It really depends on what they do next.”

Some in the industry have speculated that, were the Netomnia deal to go through, it could potentially put the UK on a path back toward a duopoly (Openreach and Virgin Media). Katie’s perspective on this is that it would be a “really interesting piece for Ofcom to think about, if it were to be Nexfibre/VMO2 [with Netomnia]. Scale brings obligations and we’ve had to live those. But I suspect I could see in a world, if that is the case, then we wouldn’t be the only ones having Significant Market Power (SMP) and there may be a day when Openreach doesn’t have it. And that does really impact what you can do.”

Finally, the interview touches on the thorny subject of the analogue phone (PSTN) switch off, which is rapidly approaching its deadline at the end of January 2027. As regular readers will know, Openreach has developed a temporary Emergency Voice Access (EVAc) solution for those who fail to migrate (post-Jan 2027 details).

However, both Richard and Katie highlight that EVAc doesn’t have enough capacity for the current volume of lines that may fall into this boat, with Katie saying: “We don’t have an unconstrained capacity for [EVAc], so it really needs to be those critical lines that we really don’t have an option to put through and we need to provide them some continuity in the short term.” Check out the full interview below.