Openreach Full Fibre Now Reaches 8 Million UK Premises

Openreach has reached a third of its commitment to build full fibre connections to 25 million premises in the UK by 2025.

It was back in April this year when Openreach told Silicon UK that it had connected more than seven million British homes and premises to full fibre, which was the quarter mark of its 25 million target.

Now three months later and Openreach has confirmed it has expanded its full fibre reach to 8m homes and businesses across the UK – including 2.5m in the hardest to reach ‘final third’ of the country.

Full fibre

Openreach also revealed that the number of customers who have ordered Full Fibre and are now connected to the new network has reached just over 2m.

And it seems that demand for full fibre is continuing to grow – as Openreach is handling around 35,000 new orders every week and more than 40 Communication Providers (CPs) including the likes of BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, have signed up to its long-term wholesale Full Fibre pricing offer.

Openreach also updated its build notification plan, revealing plans to deliver Full Fibre in 12 new locations across the UK.

This includes around 140,000 homes and businesses in urban and rural locations, including more than 50,000 new premises on the Isle of White.

Overall, more than 2,700 towns, cities, boroughs, villages and hamlets are now included in the company’s ultrafast Full Fibre build programme.

The full list of FTTP locations and timescales being updated regularly on the Openreach website, or people can visit the Openreach fibre checker.

Openreach commitments

The advantage of full fibre connections is that it can deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps, and will allow BT to continue switching people away from its legacy analogue copper-based connections.

The UK government had an ambitious target of making 1Gbps capable broadband available to at least 85 percent of the country by 2025.

There are said to be at least 29 million homes in the UK, and this number is growing annually.

To help achieve this target, the UK regulator Ofcom in March 2021 agreed the pricing and other conditions needed for Openreach parent BT to commit £12 billion of its own money for the rollout of FTTP.

Following Ofcom’s pricing agreement, Openreach announced in May 2021 that it would increase and expand its build out of Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) to 25 million premises, despite having to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic at the time.

Openreach also pledged later in May 2021 that it would deliver full fibre broadband to another three million homes and businesses in some of the hardest to reach parts of the UK.