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The announcement means around 3,500 towns, cities, boroughs, villages, and hamlets are now included in the company’s build programme
Broadband infrastructure provider Openreach has announced its plan to deploy full fibre broadband to 517 additional locations in the UK, bringing fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) to 2.7 million more homes and businesses.
The new build plan notably 400,000 homes in rural areas.
Openreach is aiming to make gigabit-capable broadband available to 25 million homes and businesses by the end of 2026, including 6.2 million rural and remote areas, which is expected to cost £15 billion. As of last December, the company had reached the halfway point, having deployed full fibre to 12.5 million premises around the country.
“We plan to build right across the UK, from cities and towns to far-flung farms and island communities. Ultimately, we’ll reach as many as 30 million premises by the end of the decade if there’s a supportive political and regulatory environment,” said Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach in the press release.
“Over time, we’ve learnt to deliver predictably, consistently and at a rapid pace – despite this being a hugely complex national engineering project” he continued.
Openreach is currently deploying FTTP to 78,000 new premises every week – roughly the equivalent of a town the size of Wakefield. At this build rate, Openreach will build out to the remaining 12.5 million homes in half the time it took to complete the first half of the rollout.
Selley claims this is the fastest of any operator in Europe.
With the completion of the nearly announced 2.7 million premises, Openreach will have achieved its goal of passing 25 million homes with FTTP by 2026.
The importance of maintaining this aggressive rollout pace, both in urban and rural areas, is not lost on the government. In December, Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure, John Whittingdale, said it is “vital the industry maintains its pace of delivery, and extends if further supported by our £5 billion Project Gigabit, ensuring rural and hard to reach communities do not miss out.”
“This marks another important step in our ambition for 85 per cent of properties to have access to Gigabit-capable connections by 2025 delivering a modern digital infrastructure to every corner of the UK,” he continued.
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