Openreach Unveil 29 New UK Areas for FTTP Gigabit Broadband
January 27, 2020
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Network provider Openreach (BT) has today unveiled the next quarterly batch of 29 new UK rollout locations (total of 103 so far) for their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology, which aims to cover 4 million premises (homes and businesses) by March 2021 and then 15 million by around 2025.
At present the national operator has already deployed their “full fibre” network to cover 1.5 million UK premises and the rollout continues to ramp-up (currently passing 22,000 homes and businesses every week). So far this is said to have been delivered at the “lower end” of their £300 – £400 per premises passed cost range (c.£5.25bn for 15 million) and the expectation is to “pass around 50% of UK premises within this range of costs.”
NOTE: Deployment costs rise disproportionately the further you go outside of lucrative urban areas. Openreach claim those in the final 10% could cost £4K each to pass (here).
The top fastest consumer (residential) focused FTTP tier on their network is 330Mbps (50Mbps upload) and related wholesale prices have recently been reduced (here). On top of that a more affordable 550Mbps and 1000Mbps tier (currently these are only options for business users) is set to be introduced for homes from 23rd March 2020 (here), although we don’t yet know which ISPs will offer these.