Openreach – the wholesale-only last-mile subsidiary of BT – said its interim milestone, confirmed today, has been achieved "just ahead of our original schedule", despite delays caused by the pandemic.
Announcing the milestone, Openreach said: "We’re continuing to accelerate the programme – having built full fibre to more than 1.9 million premises so far this year. We’re on track to get to 20 million premises by the mid to late 2020s – at which point nearly two thirds of the UK will be able to order full fibre services over our network."
Openreach also said it had invested "more than £14 billion" over the last decade across all projects.
Earlier this month, the UK government announced Project Gigabit, a £5 billion infrastructure project that will connect "more than one million hard to reach homes and businesses" in its first phase.
Up to 510,000 homes and businesses in Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley will be the first to benefit. Contracts for these first areas will go to tender in the spring with "spades in the ground" in the first half of 2022.
The following week, in its latest market review, Ofcom said more than two-thirds of UK properties would soon have a choice of fibre networks; a move expected to encourage Openreach to retire its copper network.
At the time, Openreach CEO Clive Selley said: “We’ve now passed almost 4.5 million premises and are building faster, at lower cost and higher quality than anyone else in the UK. Today’s regulation will allow us to ramp up to three million premises per year providing vital next generation connectivity for homes and business right across the UK.”
Speaking to the state of fibre connectivity in the UK, David Burns, executive director of Boundless Networks and founder and chairman of UK Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (UK WISPA), said a disruptive approach is key.
“The only way to increase the fixed wireless footprint in the UK is to leverage truly disruptive broadband options from across the market. The importance of getting this done has absolutely been highlighted in 2020, with urgent calls for secure, high-performance connectivity to enable individuals and businesses while they adapt to working from home," he said.
Commenting on the recent news from Ofcom, Burns continued: "With more diverse competition in the fixed telecom market and innovation brought to the front of the conversation, these decisions from Ofcom present an unmissable opportunity for the industry to mature as a whole.”
