BT results show 6.5 million premises signed up for full fibre

The BT Group results for the year ending 31st March 2025 have finally been published. The headline for broadband being that take-up of the Openreach full fibre services was running at 6.5 million subscribing premises back at the end of March 2025.

BT Group delivered strong progress against its strategic priorities in FY25, as we stepped up the pace of build of the UK’s leading next generation networks. We set new record build and connect highs: our full fibre network now reaches more than 18m homes and businesses, with more than 6.5m already connected, and we were awarded the country’s best mobile network for the 11th year in a row recognising EE’s clear leadership in 5G. We also accelerated the pace of simplification and transformation, agreeing asset sales, improving customer satisfaction across all of our brands and business segments, and delivering over £900m of annualised cost savings.

Although revenue declined year-on-year driven mainly by lower international sales and handsets, strong cost control and a step-up in focus and transformation resulted in growth in both EBITDA and normalised free cash flow, allowing us to increase our dividend for FY25 by 2% to 8.16p per share.
The momentum in, and impact of, our full fibre programme is such that we are now raising our build target by 20% to up to 5m UK premises in FY26, keeping us comfortably on track to reach 25m by the end of 2026, while maintaining our cash flow guidance. We are now only one year away from our inflection to £2bn of normalised free cash flow, our target for FY27, and remain on track to deliver £3bn by the end of the decade.

With the leadership team now in place to take our strategy forward, I am confident that as we build and connect at pace, our transformation will accelerate and deliver a better BT for all of us – our customers, our colleagues, the country and our owners.

Allison Kirkby, Chief Executive on the results

The last 12 months has seen Openreach pass some 4.3 million premises with its full fibre rollout with the total footprint at just over 18 million. Announcements independent of the results e.g. Richard Tang talking at Connected North put the total at 18.3 million on 24th April 2025. 4.9 million of these premises are in rural areas of the UK

An interesting figure is that the ARPU for Openreach is running at £16 currently a rise of 6% in the year, apparently driven by a mixture of the higher FTTP take-up rates, improving speed mix and the CPI. Of the 6.5 million premises subscribing to an FTTP service in the last quarter i.e. Jan to March 2025 there was 500,000 net adds. The take-up rate is running at 36% which BT Group describes as market leading.

Not everything is rosy, as the total number of Openreach broadband lines fell by 243,000 in the quarter, this is an ongoing pattern. The reasons given are losses to competitors especially in areas where another full fibre service has arrived before Openreach and surprisingly what BT calls weaker broadband market.

The ARPU for Openreach is what Openreach has to base its investment decisions on, but for the larger group there is the extra revenue from the BT Consumer sector and of the Openreach FTTP subscribers some 3.4 million are with a BT Consumer retailer (BT, EE or Plusnet). 5.8% of those BT Consumer FTTP subscriptions (200,000) lines are business customers.