BT Wholesale FINALLY make 1.8Gbps FTTP broadband available to UK ISPs

After two years of waiting since Openreach first made their new consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband tiers – 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps – available across the UK market (here). BT’s own wholesale division has finally now launched related products on their platform for retail UK ISP partners to sell on to customers.

The impact of this change is likely to be limited as many ISPs are already harnessing networks from other wholesale suppliers that can support the new speed tiers, or even by building their own platforms independent of BTWholesale (e.g. EE, Zen Internet etc.). Suffice to say that quite a few Openreach based ISPs have already made retail packages available via the new tiers using those alternative approaches.

Nevertheless, there are still some retail providers that have opted to wait for BTW to play their slow game of industry catch-up, which in practice often leaves them stuck offering top speeds of no more than 1Gbps (frequently advertised as c.900Mbps – average speeds as at peak time).

Earlier this year BTW informed ISPreview that the reason it was taking such a long time to introduce the “new” speed tiers is because their “focus has been [on] supporting partners and their customers through the UK’s transition to All-IP” (i.e. switching off and migrating users away from the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) by 31st Jan 2027). But it’s also true that there have always been extra costs and network upgrades required to facilitate support for faster tiers too, which can take a bit of time to deploy.

The good news, as first spotted by ISPreview reader John and later via our forum, is that BT Wholesale’s Broadband Checker service has just been updated to increase the maximum download speed on their FTTP listing up to 1800Mbps. This is usually a firm indication that BTW now support the new tiers and sure enough they’ve added both 1.2Gbps (usually advertised as 1Gbps) and 1.8Gbps (advertised as 1.6Gbps) to their price list – available from today (8th November 2026).

BTW are currently charging a monthly rental to ISPs of £49.66 excluding VAT for 1.2Gbps and £51.66 for 1.8Gbps, so obviously you can expect the retail prices to be higher than that once ISPs have added all of the usual extra service costs, tax and a profit margin to the final figure etc.

Meanwhile, Openreach are already in the process of expanding their pilot for a new range of symmetric capable FTTP (XGS-PON) broadband speeds up to 8.5Gbps (only EE currently offers this as a commercial package), and we can only hope that BTW won’t take another 2-3 years to adapt to that too it exits the pilot-phase – expected sometime in 2027.