March 2024 update on Openreach full-fibre roll-out

The volume of premises where we’ve mapped Openreach full-fibre as ready for service in the last month is massively lower than the previous month i.e. 222,196 premises versus 496,224 premises. This means the Openreach FTTP footprint we’ve mapped is now 40.96% of premises in the UK.

This big drop is we believe not indicative of a big slowdown, but rather during the previous month we’d managed to get closer to the leading edge of the Openreach FTTP roll-out. If we see figures of around 220,000 premises in the next couple of months then we can talk about what looks like a slowdown. 

The slower month has pushed the date when we would expect to be reporting Openreach has passed 25 million premises with its full-fibre network, so it is within a January 2027 to July 2027 window now.

On the last entry in the table where the proportion of Openreach full-fibre has dropped compared to the previous month, in terms of raw number of premises this was the one time period for property where we saw a rise in the actual Openreach full-fibre footprint. The percentage dropped because with the latest ONS postcode dataset released in late February 2024 we’ve been determining where OFNL, Fibre Nest, Hyperoptic and others are present in new build homes and apartments. This meant a large amount of full-fibre from the alt-nets.