Broadband infrastructure provider Openreach has unveiled plans to extend its full fibre broadband services to 517 additional locations across the UK, bringing fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) to an extra 2.7 million homes and businesses.
This ambitious rollout includes 400,000 homes in rural areas, highlighting Openreach’s commitment to bridging the digital divide. The company aims to provide gigabit-capable broadband to 25 million homes and businesses by the end of 2026, with 6.2 million of those in rural and remote regions, at an estimated cost of £15 billion. As of December last year, Openreach had reached the halfway point of this target, having deployed full fibre to 12.5 million premises nationwide.
“We are committed to building across the entire UK, from urban centres to remote farms and island communities,” said Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach. He added that the company aims to reach up to 30 million premises by the decade’s end, contingent on supportive political and regulatory conditions.
Openreach is currently deploying FTTP to 78,000 new premises each week, equivalent to covering a town the size of Wakefield. At this accelerated pace, Openreach expects to complete the remaining 12.5 million premises in half the time it took to cover the first half of the rollout. Selley noted that this makes Openreach the fastest operator in Europe in terms of deployment speed.
The government’s support for this rapid expansion is evident. In December, John Whittingdale, Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure, emphasized the necessity of maintaining this swift rollout pace. He highlighted the importance of the £5 billion Project Gigabit in ensuring that rural and hard-to-reach communities are not left behind.
Whittingdale stated that this progress is crucial to achieving the goal of providing gigabit-capable connections to 85 percent of UK properties by 2025, aiming to deliver modern digital infrastructure to every corner of the country.