Twelve years ago we were watching the UK superfast footprint passing the 65% mark and today we are seeing the much faster and reliable full-fibre networks deliver 65.06% coverage of the UK.
This latest point in coverage has taken 30 days for us to reach, but there has been the Easter Holiday to slow things down a little.
For those looking at the future picture, the prediction is that the UK will reach 85% full-fibre coverage in July 2025 and 85% Gigabit coverage in September this year (Gigabit coverage is currently at 82.08%). For those who don’t know why the two figures differ it is because the older Virgin Media O2 coax/fibre hybrid network can deliver Gigabit speeds. Obviously if in the next 15 months we continue to see FTTP rolled out at the pace of 1 point per month the July 2025 date is going to slip, so its important to keep an eye on the longer term pace rather than just a single month.
The list of shame, which is the ten local authority areas with the least amount of FTTP (to see the full list of councils, head over to our council list), has been updated to:
- Shetland Islands 5.80%, an increase of 0.05 since 15th March 2024
- Na h-Eileanan an Iar 6.39%, no change since 15th March 2024
- Isles of Scilly 9.49% FTTP, no change since 2024
- Orkney Islands 10.63%, an increase of 1.23 since 15th March 2024
- West Dunbartonshire 10.92%, an increase of 0.04 since 15th March 2024
- Harlow District 13.67%, an increase of 0.01 since 15th March 2024
- Argyll and Bute 16.09%, an increase of 0.95 since 15th March 2024
- Perth and Kinross 17.75%, an increase of 0.08 since 15th March 2024
- Telford and Wrekin 20.69% a new entrant on the list
- South Tyneside District 20.83%, an increase of 0.72 since 15th March 2024
North Norfolk has left the list of the ten worst councils for full fibre coverage by virtue of its coverage rising from 20.37% to 20.87% since 15th March 2024.
Of course not all full-fibre being built is going into areas that don’t have full-fibre yet, the level of overlap between the different networks will appear later on 14th April 2024. The overnight data processing is taking longer than usual due to everything going on. This is partly due to us originally expecting to hit 65% on Saturday 13th April, but we were just three thousand premises shy at 64.99% a day ago and therefore analysis needed to run again.
Update 7pm Sunday 14th May 2024: The analysis scripts have now had time to run so the figures for overlapping full-fibre networks are currently:
- 5,808,520 premises (17.96% of the UK) an increase of 272,349 premises with two or more FTTP networks available
- 686,893 premises (2.12%) an increase of 52,199 premises with three or more FTTP networks available
- 39,098 premises (0.12%) an increase of 3,882 premises with four FTTP networks available
- 3,402 premises (0.01%) an increase of 428 premises with five different FTTP networks available
The amount of overbuild was such in the last month that if there was no overlapping we’d have been reporting the 65% mark two weeks earlier. So far still no properties with six different full-fibre network options.
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How can Harlow actually decrease!!!!!!!!
New properties without FTTP. Could be a tiny cluster that were enough to have the number rounded down.
The decrease was actually the previous month, brain fade moment meant I did not change word to increase which is what is did this month.
At District council level does not take many premises to shuffle things around slightly.
Can you please explain why the level of overbuild in this update (5.8m) differs from the March 2024 update on broadband availability (6.1m)?
Different analysis – suspect an issue with nexfibre counting will try and look into this
OK was not nexfibre, but down to some networks being counted twice, a hangover largely linked to CityFibre and multiple retailers and manually setting which network is present
The figures in the 65% are correct, and the 7th of month summary was the over-stating multiple FTTP figures. A run on a limited area of UK is showing a fix that works. Will know better once next overnight set runs.
thanks so much, Andrew
Now that cityfibre finally reached south of Leicester its suburbs are out of the list.