Openreach to speed up its fibre rollout

Openreach has today launched its ‘fibre first programme’ – which includes accelerating the company’s rollout of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) by 50 per cent, with the new aim of reaching three million homes and businesses in the UK by the end of 2020.

The BT-owned company has announced that it will start rolling out FTTP in a few months in an initial eight cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, London, and Manchester.

“Openreach needs to prove it can build FTTP at scale for a competitive cost, said Clive Selley, Openreach’s CEO. “Last year, our consultation with industry helped us identify a set of enablers to help us do this. For example, we need a supportive public policy and regulatory environment that encourages infrastructure investment. We need to get the costs of delivering fibre down and ensure that there is demand for and take up of the new FTTP platform.

“We are already making progress for example – we’ve halved the cost of delivering fibre all the way to people’s homes and we’re piloting new ways of working with local government to cut red tape, simplify wayleaves and traffic management. We are also working with our wholesale customers on how to achieve rapid take-up on the new platform and get the incremental revenue needed to help pay for it.”