Over a three-month period, a further one million UK homes have been added to full fiber broadband connections, Openreach confirms
Openreach has met a third of its commitment to build full fiber connections to 25 million buildings in the UK by 2025.
It was in April of this year when Openreach told Silicon UK that it had connected more than seven million British homes and buildings to full fiber optics, which was a quarter of its target of 25 million.
Now, three months later, Openreach has confirmed that it has expanded its full fiber reach to 8 million homes and businesses in the UK – including 2.5 million in the country’s hardest-to-reach ‘last third’.
Full fiber
Openreach also revealed that the number of customers who have ordered Full Fiber and are now connected to the new network has reached just over 2 million.
And it seems the demand for full fiber continues to grow – as Openreach processes about 35,000 new orders each week and more than 40 communication providers (CPs), including BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone, have signed up for its long-term wholesaler Full Fiber price offer.
Openreach has also updated its build notification plan and revealed plans to deliver Full Fiber in 12 new locations across the UK.
This includes approximately 140,000 homes and businesses in urban and rural locations, including over 50,000 new properties on the Isle of White.
In total, more than 2,700 cities, towns, villages and hamlets are now included in the company’s ultra-fast Full Fiber program.
The full list of FTTP locations and timetables is regularly updated on the Openreach websiteor people can visit the Openreach fiber checker.
Open Reach Commitments
The advantage of full fiber connections is that it can deliver speeds of up to 1 Gbps, and allows BT to keep switching people from its old analog copper-based connections.
The UK government has set an ambitious target of making 1 Gbps 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 every year.
To help achieve this goal, UK regulator Ofcom agreed in March 2021 on the pricing and other terms needed for Openreach parent company BT to commit £12 billion of its own funds to the rollout of FTTP.
Following Ofcom’s pricing deal, Openreach announced in May 2021 that it would increase and expand its Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) buildout to 25 million buildings, despite being affected by the Coronavirus pandemic at the time.
Openreach also promised later in May 2021 that it would provide full fiber broadband to an additional three million homes and businesses in some of the hardest-to-reach parts of the UK.
