Openreach Boost UK FTTP Rollout Pace as BT Broadband Customers Fall to 8.2M | ISPreview UK

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The BT Group has today published their biannual full year (H2 FY25) results to March 2025, which reveals that Openreach’s full fibre (FTTP) network added 2.2 million premises to their UK coverage in H2 (up from 2.1m in H1) to cover 18.08m (4.9m in rural areas) and will accelerate its rollout by 20%. But broadband line losses to rivals hit 243k in the last quarter (up from 208k).

The group’s consumer divisions – including BT, EE and Plusnet – reported being home to a total of 8.198 million broadband connections (down from 8.234m in H1), which included 3.202m FTTP customers (up from 2.775m). BT’s business divisions similarly had 588k broadband connections (down from 609k) and 127k of those were FTTP lines (up from 112k). BT Wholesale also supplied a total of 697k broadband lines to other ISPs (up from 691k) and 93k of those were FTTP (up from 82k).

NOTE: Openreach is investing £15bn to cover 25 million UK premises by Dec 2026 (inc. 6.2m in rural or semi-rural areas). But the ambition also exists to reach up to 30m by 2030.

However, despite their Openreach division suffering another loss of broadband lines to rival networks, the network access provider continues to accelerate their roll-out of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology and has pledged to up its build rate by 20% – reaching up to five million premises passed during the year to March 2026 (it’s currently at 4.3 million). This will help to hit their 25m target on time and push past it.

In terms of consumer mobile connections, EE reported total mobile customers of 13.863m (up from 13.875m), including 10,806m using 5G (up from 10.468m). BT also reported that their fixed broadband consumers gobbled an average of 446.1GB (GigaBytes) of data per month (up from 436.5GB), which falls to 17GB for EE’s post-paid mobile users (up from 16.7GB).

Elsewhere, some 62.9% of BT’s fixed consumer base take a “superfast broadband” product (down from 66.8% in H1) and 32.6% (up from 28%) have adopted one of their “ultrafast” products, which these days largely reflects FTTP cannibalising customers from slower (FTTC and ADSL) packages. ISPreview also noted that 24.6% of BT’s customers are now taking both mobile and broadband (converged), which is up from 23.1%.

Finally, BT confirmed that EE’s 5G Standalone (mobile broadband) network had so far been rolled out across 50 major UK towns and cities, covering over 40% of the population.

Financial Highlights – BT’s Half-Yearly Change
* BT Group revenue = £10,232m (up from £10,138m in H1 FY25)
* BT Group total reported net debt = £(19,816)m (decreased from £(20,267)m)
* BT Group profit after tax = £299m (down from £755m)

Openreach’s Network

The table below offers a breakdown of fixed line network coverage and take-up by technology on Openreach’s UK network, which covers the totals for all ISPs that take their products combined (e.g. BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Zen Internet, Vodafone etc.).

Openreach-FY25-H2-network-coverage-and-takeup

The rollout of their FTTP lines continues to grow, with 2.2 million premises being added to their network coverage in H2 and that’s up from 2.1m in H1. As for take-up, some 5.53 million FTTP broadband connections have been made on Openreach’s network (up by +1m from 5.53m), which equates to a take-up of 36.13% (up from 35%). The rapid rollout of a new network usually suppresses take-up figures, thus Openreach continues to do extremely well to buck that trend.

However, the above changes also highlight the challenge alternative networks are facing, although rivals have managed to peel plenty of consumers away from the industry giant’s older network – Openreach’s total broadband lines fell from 20.549m to 20.09m in the half and that’s down by 450k (vs 377k in H1).

Allison Kirkby, CEO of BT Group, said:

“BT Group delivered strong progress against its strategic priorities in FY25, as we stepped up the pace of build of the UK’s leading next generation networks. We set new record build and connect highs: our full fibre network now reaches more than 18m homes and businesses, with more than 6.5m already connected, and we were awarded the country’s best mobile network for the 11th year in a row recognising EE’s clear leadership in 5G. We also accelerated the pace of simplification and transformation, agreeing asset sales, improving customer satisfaction across all of our brands and business segments, and delivering over £900m of annualised cost savings.

Although revenue declined year-on-year driven mainly by lower international sales and handsets, strong cost control and a step-up in focus and transformation resulted in growth in both EBITDA and normalised free cash flow, allowing us to increase our dividend for FY25 by 2% to 8.16p per share.

The momentum in, and impact of, our full fibre programme is such that we are now raising our build target by 20% to up to 5m UK premises in FY26, keeping us comfortably on track to reach 25m by the end of 2026, while maintaining our cash flow guidance. We are now only one year away from our inflection to £2bn of normalised free cash flow, our target for FY27, and remain on track to deliver £3bn by the end of the decade.

With the leadership team now in place to take our strategy forward, I am confident that as we build and connect at pace, our transformation will accelerate and deliver a better BT for all of us – our customers, our colleagues, the country and our owners.”

Take note that BT now only publishes detailed results biannually for H1 and H2 (financial quarters), thus they release very little data for the other two quarters and that similarly means we will only be able to do two detailed reports – like the one above – twice every year.

Just a quick reminder. BT introduced a new metric in 2023, which predicted that their total labour force would shrink from 130,000 to between 75,000 and 90,000 by 2030 (inc. subcontractors). The operator also predicted that Openreach’s FTTP coverage would grow to between 25-30 million premises and deliver take-up of between 40-55% by that same date. The latest report includes a quick progress update on this.

BT Group’s Progress Against Strategic Metrics:

• FTTP premises passed increased by 4.3m to 18.1m; target of 25-30m

• Openreach take-up increased to 36% and retail take-up increased by 0.8m to 3.4m; targets of 40-55% and 6.5-8.5m respectively

• 5G UK population coverage increased to 85% and 5G retail connections increased by 1.7m to 13.2m; targets of >98% and 13.0m-14.5m respectively

• Total labour resource decreased by 4k to 116k; target of 75-90k

• Group Net Promoter Score of 29.5; target of 30-35

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