Openreach marks half way point on its massive FTTP build

Openreach has announced that its FTTP build has hit the 12.5 million premises passed point, which means they are half way on the journey towards building a full-fibre network to 25 million properties by the end of 2026. They are also looking at carrying on the roll-out with an eventual ambition of 30 million premises passed by 2030.

This is a national infrastructure project that’s a genuine success story. We’re delivering engineering on an epic scale, on time and on budget – and that’s thanks to a supportive policy environment which has led to huge investment and competition throughout the UK’s telecoms sector.

From a standing start just a few years ago, we’ve now made this life-changing technology available to 12.5 million premises and counting and we’re building faster than any operator I’m aware of in Europe.

Our build rate is still accelerating and it’ll take us half the time to reach our next 12.5 million. But we won’t be stopping there. Ultimately, we’ll reach up to 30 million premises by the end of the decade – unlocking a raft of economic and social benefits by supporting new models of commerce, healthcare and public services.

Clive Selley, CEO, Openreach

Openreach engineer at a customers property installing the final fibre at its external splice point

The choice of an image showing an install taking place is to highlight that Openreach is also connecting a lot of live customers, some four million to date and orders are coming in at a rate of 30,000 a week. The work connecting many more millions of properties is also partly why the next 5 million premises in the 2026 to 2030 period is expected to take longer, i.e. staff who have been working on the roll-out will be shifted to installs and more of this 5 million will be in harder to reach circumstances.

The Openreach FTTP build is part of a £15 billion investment programme and is crucial to ensuring Openreach retires its old copper network and shrinks the number of exchanges it operates from.

As part of the ongoing roll-out another 142 locations have been added to the roll-out, with the potential to cover some 1.4 million homes and businesses.

Our map is updating in the morning of 7th December to reflect the footprint we have mapped which is 12,189,576 premises as of 9am 7th December 2023 passed by the Openreach full-fibre network. Based on the speed we’ve been seeing the footprint grow in the last few weeeks the missing 320,000 premises will be on the maps in the next 4 to 5 weeks, we will be sure to update you when finally hit 12.5 million.

In terms of Openreach being on track our estimates suggest October or November 2027 for hitting the 25 million premises passed mark. If the increased volume that we’ve found in the last month is sustained we can expect this estimate to get closer to the start of 2027.

The list of 142 new locations where Openreach is saying they will now deploy FTTP is:

Update Thursday 7th December: Small clarification when talking about next 5 million being slower to build, we missed the words ‘ in the 2026 to 2030 period’ in what we originally wrote. Also have added a note to highlight that this jump from 25 to 30 million premises passed will involve the harder to connect properties, we have deliberately not said rural properties since there are going to be a mixture of rural and urban premises not in the first 25 million premises built to.

Another update is that the total we have checked and found Openreach has built to has risen from 12,180,156 premises as of 9am 6th December 2023 to 12,189,576 premises passed as of 9am on 7th December 2023.

Also we need to highlight again due to some coverage of this milestone that we have seen, the 12.5 million figure is referring to the ability for the public to choose to order FTTP from a retailer who uses the Openreach network. Additionally while headlines often talk of Gigabit or 1.6 Gbps speeds the Openreach FTTP products start with an entry level 40 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload product so that those on a tighter budget can upgrade to the reliability of full fibre, and for those where VDSL2 was slow or non-existent even this slow speed will be a significant upgrade.