September 2023 update on broadband availability across the UK, nations and regions

While Wales and Scotland are still low down the table due to the relatively low Gigabit coverage levels, in terms of helping those who cannot get superfast speeds both countries are showing a better improvement in the superfast figures than other parts of Great Britain. Northern Ireland continues to be the place to live if you want full-fibre with one third of properties having a choice of two different FTTP networks.

The East of England may see something of a slow down for its full-fibre footprint in the next month, as while we have previously being steadily building the Upp footprint, it appears that they have stopped marketing to new customers, or their online checker is broken. Since Upp has been purchased by nexfibre/Virgin Media O2/Liberty Global we suspect that this is part of that purchase and in time the Upp locations will be added to the nexfibre footprint and marketed by Virgin Media O2. In terms of nexfibre the footprint is growing as we find more locations where it exists and have found 16,000 premises passed in October so far.

For now, Virgin Media O2 is the largest Gigabit retailer in the UK. In another year or so this title will be challenged as providers selling a mixture of networks e.g. Vodafone who sell over the Openreach and CityFibre full-fibre networks see their footprint edge towards 16 million premises.

A number of full-fibre network builders have made statements about shifting to focus more on take-up rather than build as fast as possible, but since almost all the networks have a good number of streets in pre-order phases where just a little work is needed to make them live, we have not seen a massive slow down yet. 

On the dip in the percentage coverage of Openreach FTTP in Northern Ireland, while the percentage has gone done slightly there was an additional 1,000 Openreach FTTP premises added in the month, the reason for the drop is that the overall property count for Northern Ireland increased by 4,000. This property increase was driven by chasing down the Fibrus footprint and finding some zero premise postcodes that appear to have 1 or 2 premises in them, and Google Streetview checks for some did show buildings present.