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Network The Internet United Kingdom

UK Full-Fiber Broadband Coverage Jumps From 12% to 78% in Five Years (ft.com) 28

Posted by msmash from the encouraging-signs dept.
The UK has transformed its broadband infrastructure in five years -- with full-fiber coverage jumping from 12% of properties in January 2020 to more than 78% by 2025, according to communications regulator Ofcom and ThinkBroadband data. Northern Ireland leads with 96% of premises in postcodes served with full-fiber connections.

The rollout accelerated after Ofcom's May 2021 regulatory framework gave other providers access to BT's Openreach ducts and poles while promising the company regulatory certainty through a "fair bet" approach that avoided price caps. The framework sparked investment from alternative networks, or "altnets," which increased homes passed from 8.2 million in 2022 to 16.4 million by 2025.
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UK Full-Fiber Broadband Coverage Jumps From 12% to 78% in Five Years More

UK Full-Fiber Broadband Coverage Jumps From 12% to 78% in Five Years

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  • UK residential internet and wireless service is still far behind the rest of the developed world. More work needs to be done.

    • Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

      • I mean, fair anecdote, but I get 1Gb/s symetric fibre to the premises here in the UK. Without data, it's hard to make the argument you're trying to.

        • Yes its an anecdote, and you get 1Gb/s now, sure.

          This was 8 years ago - and gigabit fibre to the premises was not new in NZ when I moved here.

          And in the UK I lived in a large city, while in NZ I live in a rural town.

          But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.

          • But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.

            Er... that's literally the headline of the article.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by hattig ( 47930 )

            The article shows that fibre rollout was massively limited by incumbent providers - BT OpenReach (i.e., the old monopoly BT who have that old monopoly mentality still!) and Virgin's cable network, and we all know what Virgin are like.

            Once access to ducts was made mandatory, competitors (CityFibre, CommunityFibre) could rollout fibre without massive street works.

            Note that older cities are far harder to bring up to speed with new technology than less dense newer cities.

            But mainly fibre rollout is a political

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It's good that we are getting there, but frustrating that we are so far behind the times, and that some people pay way over the odds for it.

          Some countries started getting gigabit fibre decades ago. For Japan it was in the 2000s, and I remember how it was a completely different experience using it. These days they have near universal fibre, DSL hasn't been available for installation for years, and the base speed is 10Gb, with 20Gb being available in many cities too.

          In the UK it's also a postcode lottery. A f

      • Except this article is about "full fibre" and how widely available it now is, it is not about FTTC which you used to have back when you lived here. Sure, it's not at 100%, but it will have to be pretty soon as the current tiemframe BT has set to remove copper is supposed to be end of 2026 (that's been pushed back a year I think already though).

    • That's crazy, my old little town in southern Kansas had fiber to every house

    • Wait, I've been told for decades that America was the worst with regard to broadband coverage? What happened?

      • Perhaps the 20 to 80 mbit packages most people in UK were stuck with were technically broadband. Just the kind of broadband you'd find acceptable twenty years ago, not today. Prices are still outrageous. Imagine paying 50 bucks for 20mbit if your fixed contract ran out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        his town probably choose to run or partner with a local ISP to run fiber from the money provided by the feds instead of selling their soul to Verizon or bigger corpos to do it for them and they are still waiting.

    • Yeah, BT (and their puppets, OpenReach) have been holding the UK up for decades. It's only because the regulator ran out of patience and told them to get on with it that they bothered to do it. For years and years they kept coming up with new excuses why they couldn't get fibre to homes or down their conduits under streets. All of a sudden, they found a way to do it - and guess what... everyone wants it.

      To put this into context, I remember in my second job hearing about how BT were going to deliver fast Int

  • The entire country would fit in what? 2 states in America? Love all these "this country has better/faster internet than the USA" stories. Yeah, and most of those countries fit within 1-2 states in America. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT.

    • Re:How LARGE is England? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @07:46PM (#65508644)

      Not really. The population weighted density of the US and Europe are fairly similar, although England is on the high side, similar to California and Nevada.

      Population weighted density is the correct metric, not population density. Nobody is proposing running fibre to every square metre.

      • Not in the middle west. Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Montana, Colorado OUTSIDE of the front range corridor, New Mexico and, yes, Texas...much lower population density. All of the UK is smaller than Wyoming. England...58 million people live in England alone and it's the size of New York. Now, Boston->Washington->DC I could believe has similar, or even higher, densities, but not the middle of the country.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          The population weighted density of Nevada is one of the highest in the US.

          You're insisting on using population density, or for some reason, aboslute size. The denominator for population density is land area. But nobody is running fibre to every square metre. As I said (and you ignored) the important metric is population weighted density. That's the average population density each person lives in. If most people are clustered in towns and cities, this is high. So Nevada, for example, has one of the highest

    • The entire country would fit in what? 2 states in America? Love all these "this country has better/faster internet than the USA" stories. Yeah, and most of those countries fit within 1-2 states in America. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT.

      I was going to post much the same if nobody else did.

      Complaints of the slow spread of infrastructure in the USA are usually in matters concerning cellular service or EV chargers but internet access will certainly rank high on the list too. As I see it there's two things that slow the spread of infrastructure in the USA besides how spread out the population centers are in the USA.

      One thing slowing down infrastructure expansion is government interference. We have governments that love to hand out subsidies

    • Great Britain is roughly the size and population of the northeast states + Maryland + DC. I don't think the fiber coverage in that area is anywhere near 78%. I'd say it is much closer to that original 12%, and there's 2 companies that are making a lot of money keeping it that way.
      • GB is smaller than that- It's twice the size of NY. All of the UK is slightly smaller than Wyoming, which gives you scale. Of course, we have no water so that prohibits 65 million people living in Wyoming.

    • The entire country would fit in what? 2 states in America? Love all these "this country has better/faster internet than the USA" stories.

      American is 80% urban population. The fact that Alaska is vast and unpopulated has no real bearing on how hard it is to install fibre in the east coast economic corridor.

      Yeah, and most of those countries fit within 1-2 states in America. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT.

      NOT THAT MUCH you aren't.

    • For reference, Great Britain is a bit smaller than Minnesota, but has about 12.5 times the population.

  • "Fibre" (Score:3, Informative)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday July 10, 2025 @03:12AM (#65509094) Homepage

    Dumb paywall, but for reference, "full fibre" is not fully fibre still.

    FTTC for the most part. 80+-year-old telephone lines for the rest.

    • No there's actually a lot of FTTP now. This is the whole point: it's now practical for 3rd parties to run fibres, which won't use the BT cabinets anyway. On my street, CommunityFibre will string fibres on telegraph poles and they're offering speeds up to 3gbit/s. Though quite how anyone on the street verifies they get what they've paid for is a mystery to me.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        Quote:

        "NOTE: The operatorâ(TM)s average FTTP build rate is currently 81,000 premises per week (c. 1 million per quarter) and their network has a take-up rate of 35%. Openreach has so far covered almost 17m UK premises."

        "theyâ(TM)ve also expressed an ambition to reach up to 30m by 2030"

        So you have only 35% of 17m premises actually using it - and they will cover less than half the country by 2030. Don't forget that "premises" is a rather odd definition too, because that treats HMO's and flats etc.

        • Not everyone uses open reach. Community fiber string their own cables.

          I think premises are fine for consideration. National infrastructure gets you as far as the building, but in theme of infrastructure building, the government isn't responsible for crappy landlords. That's a different department about renters rights. It's also something that's solved differently with different market forces.

          Also I didn't have fttp. Could do, never bothered. It'd be silly counting that as a negative. I'm lazy, happy with my

    • No, in the UK "fibre" might well just mean FTTC. "Full fibre" specifically means FTTP.

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