So lucky to have community fibre in our area as well as the Openreach & Virgin options. Love the symmetrical upload/download speeds. All other options in our road limit the upload speed. Because of course all we need is streaming content into our houses isn't it? Working from home means often uploading large data sets which is where the fast upload speed is a god-send.
BT fiber rollout passes 17 million homes, altnet challenge grows
BT Group claims to have pulled off a record build rate of more than a million premises in the final three months of 2024 amid efforts to install fiber connectivity across the UK and fierce competition from altnets. The Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) stats were outlined in the former state-owned telco monopoly's financial results …
COMMENTS
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Friday 31st January 2025 11:41 GMT Like a badger
Ah, yes, those altnets
They may be taking new customers, but they're still burning cash, and not within a country mile of covering their cost of capital. Even CityFibre, which is in relative terms large and well run is only bringing in £100m-£130m a year of sales, but needs an operating profit of over £300m to cover its capital costs. Unless they can increase their customer numbers ten fold (and quickly) then somebody is losing money and somebody is having to keep putting cash in to keep the ball rolling. Many other altnets have massive invested capital but tiny customer bases, and no operating scale at all. Private equity has rushed into this as a fabulous infrastructure investment opportunity (often the idiots running our pension funds have a stake too), but there's no way out. In a hugely competitive market with two long established players with lower capital requirements per property served (BT, VM), and the slow but growing emergence of wireless broadband the commercial outlook for altnets is bleak. Hopefully the often high quality assets will survive the inevitable fold down of the companies who built them.
The whole altnet sector needs massive consolidation and massive writedowns of the order of £7bn before the commercials balance.
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Saturday 1st February 2025 20:02 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Ah, yes, those altnets
FWIW Telewest didn't exist in name until the early 90's and can trace their origin to the local Cryden Cable franchise. It was the late 80's early 90's when all the small local cable franchise started merging until we were left with NTL and Telewest, who, after some years also merged. As mentioned above, I agree the the "alt-net" fibre providers will almost certainly merge in a similar way.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Ah, yes, those altnets
For decent service, don't forget the option of using a smaller supplier over somebody else's network. Openreach already do this as their business and you can choose the price/speed/service balance you want, VM have promised it but not demonstrated it, and there's several altnets including CityFibre offering wholesale access.
I'm contracted with Aquiss for broadband over Openreach FTTP, and a VOIP landline with A&A. Aquiss are excellent in my experience. There's cheap and crap options like TalkTalk for those who are more price conscious and want low up front pricing but don't care about large annual price ratcheting and crap service.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:57 GMT TonyJ
Re: Ah, yes, those altnets
Yes, Openreach kept vacillating between coming soon and coming between 2024 and the end of 2026. Now, despite the entire area showing as green on their rollout map (which granted, does include the "currently building") it has gone to "Not available" - did so a couple of months ago.
Meantime, YouFibre (Netomnia) rolled out. Not only do I get gig/gig synchronous and a static IP for less than a third of what Virgin cost (the FTTC here wouldn't cut it - 32Mb down and 1Mb up), but they were happy to assist my swapping out their kit for my own with no headaches. And... if you take their static IP, then they do not port block, so even though for the first time in years I took a chance on a domestic, rather than business, line, I can happily self host e.g. email.
And to top it off - when I was on Virgin, I rarely saw 1/3 (occasionally maybe 2/3, but not often) of what I was paying so much for (and could never get anywhere with them), my cabled connection is topping out at 936 down and 912 up. And even wireless is hitting 700-800 down with 600-650 up.
When I have had to get support, (twice), they are quick and knowledgeable. And helpful.
But, I do know they are burning cash like there is no tomorrow so I really hope they manage to stick around.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:19 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: Ah, yes, those altnets
Aaaaah.
Sorry, pedant alert.
It's really annoying when people confuse synchronous with symmetric. The work you are looking for is symmetric - ie.e. the down and up speeds are the same. Synchronous is a technical feature of some signalling protocols - and often , assymetric services use a synchronous data protocol.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:22 GMT Jason Hindle
Re: Ah, yes, those altnets
The Alt-Nets will end up doing one of two things:
- Consolidating.
- Or rending their infrastructure to other ISPs, as is perfectly normal with OpenReach.
Whatever their plans, this is not an undertaking undertaken without a plan for profitability or an exit strategy.
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Friday 31st January 2025 11:48 GMT Doctor Syntax
So two thirds of people aren't choosing to pay extra for performance for which they don't see the need and receive a product lacking resilience in the face of power failure? Who could have seen that coming.
They might have got better uptake by running fibre out to those places where FTTC is inadequate but then it would have cost a lot more for each house passed.
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Friday 31st January 2025 12:06 GMT blackcat
"where FTTC is inadequate"
Like where I live. Back in early 2020 (remember those times?) Openreach was going to come to a village meeting to discuss their plan to solve the woeful FTTC problems and talk about the rural broadband voucher scheme. Part of the problem is we have very few cabinets and half the village are on very long 'exchange only' lines. The meeting never happened.
The voucher scheme is now long dead as supposedly there is a govt funded contract with Openreach for our area but no-one has any clue when, or even if, that is happening.
A number of houses near me now feature the distinctive starlink squarial and its getting sorta tempting..... If Openreach would just give a bloody timeframe!
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Friday 31st January 2025 14:30 GMT BenDwire
Lucky you. I can see the exchange from my house, but FTTC is still not available as there is no cabinet between me and it. At least I get a decent ADSL line speed, with little of no contention, as I'm in a VM area which most people have. Of course VM isn't an option for me due to the length of my drive ...
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Friday 31st January 2025 12:30 GMT IGotOut
I agree.
I've FTTC and at 38mbs it's absolutely fine for me. For me, waiting 30 seconds less to download a file for twice the price is just pointless. I was happy with it at 18mbs, but it was cheaper to switch than stay as it was
I can understand for a large family with everyone on line, or people that handle huge files, but for most it's fine.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:02 GMT Persona
A good part of the lack of uptake will be inertia with people locked into existing 2 year contracts so they will wait till their current deal expires before moving to fiber. On top of that there will be plenty who will not even have realized that the contract they were on has already expired so the are paying more for less.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:07 GMT Richard 12
Incompetence, mostly
OpenReach still insisted there were no plans to install FTTP even while the BT workers were up the pole connecting it to my house. (Yes, the van said BT)
I'd been getting FTTP with Aquiss for almost nine months before we got a flyer through the door saying it was available.
I was quite annoyed because I'd had to break contract to get it, which would never have been an issue if OpenReach had the faintest idea what they were doing.
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Friday 31st January 2025 16:09 GMT AndrueC
35% take up is actually pretty good considering it's an additional service, one that most people don't even need and is often not the only FTTP service available in an area. 35% take up is higher then their competitors and apparently cheaper per premise as well (that one really surprises me).
I know it's de rigueur to moan at anything Openreach does but this roll out has progressed very fast, appears to be on target and with this take up figure shows it to be a very successful upgrade programme.
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Tuesday 4th February 2025 14:46 GMT AndrueC
Openreach wanted to sweat their assets a little longer as is their right. Since most people were getting at least an adequate service I see no major problem with that. But the major factor spurring them on now is that the assets that support the copper network are becoming a liability in terms of maintenance because they rely on increasingly hard to source equipment.
But the bottom line is that apart from a small minority the UK has enjoyed perfectly adequate broadband since the turn of the century. There are a few relatively remote locations and some less remote (covered by old and convoluted networks, eg; some parts of London) some in places like London that have lagged behind but even now the copper network is providing a very adequate service to most of the UK.
So in my opinion BT's record remains as it always was 'adequate, not outstanding'. I doubt that many people have suffered significant hardship as a result of how they have operated and maintained their network.
The value of the copper is greatly reduced by the costs involved in getting it back out of the ground. For sure they remove it when its ducted if they can but I don't think it's a gold mine.
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Friday 31st January 2025 16:48 GMT hoola
Whilst you are correct on the resiliency point this is not really that relevant.
Copper is going so the only option will be fibre with no UPS unless you either pay or need it for specific emergency reasons.
I think it is more that people will only change when they have no option or switch provider. At that point if you have copper phone line it will be either switched to a VOIP service or turned off. Once it is turned switched or turned off you cannot get it enabled again on copper even if you don't have FTTP.
I found out this the hard way when PlusNet totally shafted up a contract change.
After that fiasco I switched to ZenInternet. Just waiting for FTTP.
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Friday 31st January 2025 12:08 GMT 42656e4d203239
Options options...
Here I have FTTP from an altnet.
Openreach haven't got around to installing fibre by me and won't for another year (at least). Recently gained another member of the household so FTTC/copper wouldn't cut it any longer. Needed bandwidth 'now' not in a year's time.
If OR had installed fibre, would i have carried on with a migrated package from FTTC copper? I doubt it - resellers of OR products tend to be quite errr pricey...
Would it have been as easy as the migration from FTTC (BT/OR) to FTTP provided by the altnet? I doubt it. Oddly the only issue in the whole process was with BT refusing, for some reason, to release my landline number.
YMMV of course, and going with an altnet does have risks - I have run into none of them so far.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:02 GMT Evilgoat76
Its a bit rich..
Given how much they have been paid to deliver this...
Leaving asside the BT business units trying to rip SME's off left right and centre with unsuitable products based on IDSN/COPPER cut off with no products for the customer. "Oh you'll use copper until the FTTP arrives!
Its not a speed to be proud of either. Our (large) village has been on poor FTTC or Vermin for years with promised FTTC some time in the future. This was so long ago we have since sued for, and won compensation for them messing up a business move and as above, selling us products we couldnt have. That would have been around 2010 we were promised FTTP imminently,
In comparison, CityFiber showed up fisrst week of Jan and are almost done. The sheer speed and organisation demonstrated has been amazing. SItes prepped, barried, trenchedm ducts in, butired and restoration works and jointers / overhead teams right behind them. At the rate they are working it will be around 6 weeks to do the entire village (Except the new bit covered by the Charles Church Protection Racket)
Yes they arent perfect, but they are ACTUALLY visibly doing something BT has been promising for about 10 years.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:27 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Its a bit rich..
Yup. AFAICS FTTC was being implemented in the areas where it was easiest - higher density of housing meaning few cabinets serving many houses. Then with the push to FTTP they're reworking exactly those same areas because every 100m of fibre laid passes many houses instead of one or two. It was obvious that they'd do this instead of continuing the FTTC roll-out. If FTTC hadn't got as far as a given village before it wasn't going to once the priority had been switched and neither was FTTP. So much for universal provision. Naturally the altnets would see the opportunity.
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Wednesday 5th February 2025 09:56 GMT Evilgoat76
Re: Its a bit rich..
We saw, and still do, a lot of situations where a housing estate is done, then the business estate on the other side of the road isn't. 100-1000 subs vs 100 at absolute most. So the business estate just doesn't get done till Glide potter along and do it for them. There is a lot of cherry picking going on now that they know others will pick up the gaps. They have also used other people's work to cover their gaps. In Dorset they just go XX% coverage and include Wessex and other providers in that. They arent saying THEY did it, but they arent not taking credit either.
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Friday 31st January 2025 13:43 GMT Altrux
The race is on
Out here in the west, in a city of 130,000, we're still waiting, waiting, waiting. Apparently there are places with 4 or 5 separate FTTP networks available to them, while we still have none. The rollout has seemed incredibly chaotic and not remotely joined-up. Apparently, Openreach and CityFibre are now both at work here, so the race is on (finally) to see who gets to us first. Goodbye, 19th century copper!
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Friday 31st January 2025 14:10 GMT katrinab
Re: There a starman....
Starlink is a lot better than previous satellite internet services for sure. But a ground-based service is always going to be better than a satellite service where it is available. Anything you can do to make satellite better, you can also do to make ground-based services better.
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Friday 31st January 2025 20:45 GMT ReggieRegReg
Re: There a starman....
Wires are great, but how long before Starlink is added to your mobile phone and runs off the same package? Even if it's different technology they'll package it up somehow or have Starlink towers everywhere (near Tesla chargers?) to rival 5G and it's future offsprings. Perhap Tesla cars will forward the signal around acting as mobile transmission stations? It's called progress - Musk will find a way, BT aren't too good at that! Still, could be worse - if it was still the Post Office we'd only just be upgrading off 56K modems by now.
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Friday 31st January 2025 19:48 GMT Gene Cash
Re: There a starman....
> where it is available
Aye, there's the rub. The question is "is Starlink better than AT&T/Spectrum for the cost?" and for me, the answer was yes.
There was a brief flash of hope when a bunch of clowns named Wire3 showed up with fibere (there, you get both spellings!) but their completely incompetent installation and total disregard of my instructions put a stop to that.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: There a starman....
And be beholden to the whims of Elongated Muskrat from here to eternity?
Sorry no. I would not put it past him to start promoting Twitter and Tesla via ads inserted into your datastream.
IF Trump gets tired of him what then? Will this manchild take it out on Starlink? It would not be that difficult. The same goes for bricking every Tesla.
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Friday 31st January 2025 14:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Com of it
Ofcom forced BT and Openreach to split eight years ago. It's part of Ofcom's role to monitor the ongoing progress of Openreach's independence from BT. Reading this article it's hard to imagine that split had any effect on BT's monopoly. How sweet that they managed to divorce but stay friends, for the sake of the kids and it makes sense that they still live together and share a bank account and wear their wedding rings, for the sake of the kids. Ofcom visits once a month to ensure BT keeps one foot on the floor when they are in bed together.
#sorryitsbeenalongweek
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:43 GMT EvilDrSmith
Re: Com of it
And the advantage of this is when the Openreach contractor does a shoddy job, including dumping (hiding) the entire run of old copper cable he's replaced in the customers recycling bin, along with some off-cuts of what looks like fibre cable (only for the customer to discover this, many hours later), BT can deny responsibility and say talk to Open Reach, and Open Reach can deny responsibility and say talk to your service provider (BT).
I'm thinking the person I actually need to talk to is Trading Standards.
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Saturday 1st February 2025 08:32 GMT Emir Al Weeq
Many, many years ago I attended a UK training course run by Ericsson. I complained that spellings had switched from English* to American-English. The reply was along the lines of:
This product is now available in the US. We translate the documentation into many languages and don't want to have to deal with spelling variations too. We asked our UK and US offices how their respective countries would react to us using the other's spelling; the US said they'd get an almighty fuss whereas the UK said customers would grumble a bit, so US it is. Apparently the trainer had given the UK course many times and I was the first to say anything.
* We often called Ericsson English, "Swinglish" due to the translation curiosities.
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Friday 31st January 2025 14:20 GMT firstnamebunchofnumbers
Altnets
Altnet customer here for the last 3 years (Swish Fibre, now Cuckoo/Jurassic/AllPointsFibre depending on which router's reverse DNS I happen to hit in `mtr`). The connection is XGPON so naturally I chose the 1Gbps symmetrical option (920Mbps in reality) just because I work in tech and wouldn't be able to take myself seriously if I chose only 250Mbps etc. At the time (with early sign-up discounts and an 18 month commitment) it was only 25% more expensive at £40 per month than their basic 150Mbps option. And 1Gbps was only £6 more per month than I had been paying for "unlimited fibre" FTTC (WTF?) with Zen (who I really like) for years.
Back in November an OpenReach flyer came through informing us that "unlimited full fibre" gigabit speeds will be available from December 2026... "up to" 1600Mbps down and 115Mbps up. Even now they are still trying to sell OpenReach's FTTC here for 85% of the cost of my 1Gbps symmetrical connection. I'll be really interested to see the pricing of OpenReach's "unlimited full fibre" service when ISPs are able to offer it in our area.
Happy with the altnets in our area to be honest. The only downside I find with Swish Fibre and their "next generation" network is that they still don't support the current version of the internet protocol (RFC 8200).
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:29 GMT Jason Hindle
Been running an Alt-Net in parallel with BT FTTC for the past six months
And now the BT contract is up, I'm making preparations to leave (just waiting for a Cisco VoIP box to arrive so I can test with an A&A account). I will be paying significantly under half what I pay BT for Broadband + Landline + Mobile (and that is taking into account a price hike at the end of my first year with the Alt-Net).
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:31 GMT I could be a dog really
Round here I noticed Fibrus cabinets appear. Then one day I was walking past and there was someone doing a lot of fibre splicing in it. My mother's house can get it, and looking up at the pole I see there's already one fibre plugged into the splitter.
Haven't done my street yet. It will be interesting to see who lights up our pole first, Fibrus who were first, or BTOR who put their gear in a couple of weeks later. I did get an email from OpenRetch to say that they are building and should be able to connect me in the next couple of months. I might just wait until both are lit, then see who offers the best (by my definition of best) option - Fibrus or Zen (via BTOR). And yes, one of my questions will be "does all the necessary infrastructure have battery backup, and how long is that guaranteed for run for ?"
As to take-up stats ... Well as others have said, many won't change until they see a good reason. Meanwhile, given that you now cannot get copper unless fibre is unavailable, it's inevitable that uptake will happen any time something happens to trigger a change (such as moving house). And come 2027 (unless the goalposts move again) it'll be "move to fibre or lose your service" for many.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:46 GMT AndrueC
And come 2027 (unless the goalposts move again) it'll be "move to fibre or lose your service" for many.
No it won't. You appear to be conflating the switching off of the BT WLR (Wholesale Line Rental) service with removal of copper. They are two completely separate things. WLR is just one of several services that BT provides over copper. When it's switched off the other services (most notably broadband internet) will continue to be supplied over copper. The only change to customers wishing to retain a 'land line' is that they switch to a VoIP service. For most this will just mean plugging their phone into the router.
BT currently says they will not withdraw copper from an exchange until fibre take up at that exchange reaches 75%. No doubt they will start to offer enticements to move people across but 2027 does not mean the end of copper services.
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Friday 31st January 2025 17:44 GMT Charles Smith
I know when OpenReach will install fibre.
Openreach's build date for Fibre on our road has been flickering on and off like dodgy fluorescent tube light for the past few years.
However 1 day before Virgin Media install FTTP in our house, scheduled for next month, I'll expect to see an OpenReach van in the street close to our house hurriedly unwinding a cable reel.
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Friday 31st January 2025 20:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Brsk
Got myself a Brsk FTTH connection that's very nearly symmetric and tops out at over 900Mbps for less than half the price of a shitty 57mbps BT service that dropped if there was a hint of rain, I've also dumped the landline phone number that was only ever called by scammers.
I do not miss BT and Openreach one bit and will not be going back.
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Friday 31st January 2025 22:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
I have two houses (doesn't everyone?): a city pied-a-terre with FTTC and a little place in the country with FTTP. Both Openreach via A&A. I have stuck with 80/20 for the fibre connection because download speeds have never been an issue. The FTTC link runs just as fast, in both directions, and has rather better latency, so that's where my Jamulus server lives/
In other words, for me as a consumer there really is no benefit to FTTP. I only have it because we are too far from any cabinet for FTTC.
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Saturday 1st February 2025 10:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
FTTP, BT style
We are in that 17 million
BTOpenReach FTTP statistic. The "FTTP" stops at a cabinet outside the nearest pub. From there on, it's copper all the way. Nominally, full bandwidth is available up to (ISTR) a mile down the road from the cabinet and the speed available then tails off progressively. My bro lives 3/4 mile down but when tested the line was too shite for BT to install. I live another 1/2 mile further along, out of reach even officially. Didn't stop the spam or the statistics though. -
Sunday 2nd February 2025 04:52 GMT Ianab
I'm in NZ, and currently around 70% of homes have FTTP now, and copper lines are to be decommissioned soon, at least in areas with full fiber. That's pretty much every city / town / village by now. Of course there are areas that are never going to see fiber, but they can at least get WISP / Cellular / Starlink for "sensible" prices. They are mostly areas that ADSL never worked anyway.
Cost? When we switched to fiber, from ADSL, the bill was about the same, but we went from ~10 / 2 mbit to 200 / 200. So no brainer there. We since dropped the land line phone, it was never used, and the only calls were from scammers. Changed to a new plan, at 950 / 500 and cost was still the same. Yes it's overkill, but I can download from Steam as fast as my LAN allows. I can shop around if I need cheaper as the physical fiber is owned by a separate company. They just rent the fiber to whatever ISP you choose. ISP then adds on their data costs and profit and charge you. Cost has gone up over the years of course, inflation basically. But because the actual fiber isn't owned by the ISP (and that part of the cost is Govt regulated), I can chose ISPs.
Govt backed the funding for the initial fiber installation, but get the $$ back over the years from the line rentals. But it means that "most" of NZ at least have the option of good broadband. How good depends on what you want to pay.