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National network access provider Openreach (BT) has confirmed that their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which offers broadband speeds of up to 1800Mbps to UK homes via hundreds of ISPs, has now covered 18.3 million UK premises (Ready for Service). This is now growing at a rate of 1.1 million premises (RFS) per quarter.
The official data shows that the operator’s FTTP network alone can now reach 55% of UK premises (out of 33 million total premises), which at country-level changes to 50% in England, 50% in Scotland, 67% in Wales and a whopping 90% in Northern Ireland where they’ve always been fairly strong.
The operator is currently investing up to £15bn to expand the coverage of this full fibre network to reach 25 million UK premises by December 2026 (here), which includes around 6.2 million premises in rural or semi-rural areas. On top of that, they’ve also expressed an ambition to reach up to 30 million by the “end of 2030“, although this is partly dependent upon a favourable outcome from Ofcom’s next Telecoms Access Review 2026 (note: it looks like they’ll get what they want on this).
Openreach currently has 15,000 people focused on their full fibre deployment and the average per premises build cost continues to hover around the £280 mark or roughly £1.2bn per year. The new service, once live, can be ordered via various ISPs, such as BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone and many more (Openreach FTTP ISP Choices) – it is not currently an automatic upgrade, although some providers have started to do free automatic upgrades as older copper-based services and lines are slowly withdrawn.
One catch in all this is that Openreach did lose 707,000 broadband lines to rivals during 2024 and some analysts expect this to accelerate in 2025 (here). But most of those losses continue to come from areas where they’ve yet to deploy FTTP (i.e. those covered by copper-based solutions, such as ADSL or FTTC / VDSL2), which is why the operator’s strategy is to “build as fast as we can to fill in those areas“, said CEO Clive Selley to Richard Tang of Zen Internet (here).