A recent survey from bOnline has shown that many SMEs are unsure about the availability of altnet in their area, with confusion over the UK’s broadband roll-out strategy.
Tue, 14/02/2023 - 11:46
The UK’s overall FTTP coverage was 13.7m premises at the end of 2022, up from 9.2m at end-2021.
Point Topic’s latest bi-monthly shows that some local authorities saw growth as high as 40-50% in percentage of their premises passed with FTTP networks.
The largest number of FTTP premises added during 2022 was in Sheffield (+87,709), while the largest growth in percentage of FTTP premises was in Broxtowe (+57.4%).
Conversely, the bottom ten local authorities saw modest growth of between 0.5% and 2.5%.
Further, 28% of UK premises still did not have access to gigabit capable broadband, with this figure highest in Wales at 45%.
The update points to overbuild as 134 local authorities had two independent fibre providers overlapping, up from 125 two months earlier.
Across the UK, more than 1.3m premises could choose between at least three independent fibre ISPs. More than 2m premises had access to two or more independent fibre providers.
Altnet progress
Among altnets with at least 50K premises passed, Brsk had the highest annual growth, from just 1K premises at end-2021 to 100K at end-2022. CityFibre, Toob, Jurassic Fibre and Fibrus also more than doubled their fibre networks during 2022.
Hyperoptic and Community Fibre passed 0.8m premises each with their FTTP networks. GNetwork followed with just over 0.4m and Gigaclear with 0.3m. In the same period, Zzoomm extended its FTTP network from 9K to 66K.
Openreach Update
In two months to the end of December 2022, Point Topic recorded a similar pace in the Openreach full fibre rollout, compared to the previous two months. It found 442,000 additional FTTP premises, noting a total recorded FTTP footprint of 8.6 million premises.
The data finds that Openreach would need to cover around 5.3m premises a year between now and 2026 to hit its 25 million premise target. Around 2.9m new FTTP premises were passed by the operator in 2022.
During 2022, Openreach added most FTTP premises in the North of England, with Sheffield, Leeds and Wakefield taking the top three spots by this measure.
