Openreach hails 'significant milestone' with ten million full-fibre connections

Openreach has hailed a milestone in its upgrade of the UK’s broadband infrastructure after making its full fibre network available to ten million homes, businesses and public services.

The BT-owned business said the roll-out of full fibre broadband across the country was part of an ambitious £15 billion infrastructure project. Since the pandemic, the UK’s internet usage has soared, doubling in 2020 and increasing year on year with more data downloaded last year than ever before. As well as improving the broadband that people use on a daily basis, the upgrade promises to improve the quality of UK public services. Openreach has also made full fibre available to more than 13,500 educational facilities such as nurseries, schools and universities.

The firm said the high-speed internet provision had been made available to more than three million premises in the hardest to reach, typically very rural, parts of the country. The full fibre transformation could give a £72bn boost to the output of the UK economy in 2030, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).

Clive Selley, chief executive of Openreach, said: “Today marks a significant milestone in our transformation of the UK’s broadband. Not only will access to full fibre technology improve the speed and reliability of the internet connections used by people, businesses and public services, it also provides us with the infrastructure we need to meet the demands of an increasingly digital world. Our engineers are building rapidly across the country and we already have plans in place that will see full fibre broadband reach over 25 million premises.”