Twenty million homes now have Openreach full-fibre broadband

Internet connection speeds have been on a dramatic upward curve for many years.

First developed in the late 1960s as a military communications network, the pre-World Wide Web internet was excruciatingly slow.

Even pioneering 1980s technologies like Prestel failed to accelerate connection speeds, and when the World Wide Web debuted in 1991, data was still being transmitted at kilobits per second.

Domestic connections through a phone socket were theoretically capped at 56 kilobits per second, though in reality, consumers barely saw a tenth of those speeds.

Upload speeds were absolutely pitiable. Symmetrical connections were little more than a pipe dream, since most data is downloaded, not uploaded.

(Domestic households have traditionally been content consumers rather than content creators).

Yet since the first home broadband connection was created in Essex in 2000, average domestic connection speeds have improved at ever-increasing rates.

In the Noughties, Fibre to the Cabinet connections increased line speeds to as much as 65Mbps – million bits per second.

This was fine for the standard-definition streaming services of the time, but even then, full fibre represented the Holy Grail of broadband connectivity.

As far back as 2013, a newly constructed Carlisle housing estate received futureproof gigabit broadband, and as 2025 draws to a close, full fibre broadband is becoming ubiquitous.

Indeed, it’s just passed a very significant milestone…

Wake me up when September ends

At the end of September, network provider Openreach confirmed that twenty million UK homes and businesses were now able to connect to their national full fibre broadband network.

That has extended the fastest (current) form of home broadband as far north as Fair Isle, and as far south as coastal Cornwall.

And while rural properties are still less likely to have full fibre broadband than their urban and suburban compatriots, living in a remote area doesn’t have to mean line speed poverty.

Openreach has achieved this landmark by cabling a million homes and workspaces every three months, across a total of 3,500 towns, cities, villages and boroughs.

And while Openreach fibre broadband engineers have carried out the work, cabled households can choose from a huge array of internet service providers.

These include Openreach’s former parent BT, industry big hitters like Sky and Plusnet, telecommunications giants including Vodafone and smaller ISPs such as BeFibre and trooli.

So does every household boast high-speed internet now?

The simple answer is no – but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

In-house data shows that Openreach fibre broadband has hitherto been taken up by only 38 per cent of households now in possession of a full fibre connection.

There are several possible factors at play here:

• Many properties will additionally be served (and may already be signed up to) full fibre broadband from firms operating their own cable networks, like Grain or Virgin Media.
• Some of these households will be among the five per cent of UK citizens without internet access at home.
• Houses with an existing ADSL internet service may be quite happy to maintain their existing connection, seeing no need to upgrade to a faster (and typically pricier) fibre alternative.

Roll with it

The purpose of Openreach’s infrastructure rollout isn’t to attract customers, since it offers no consumer internet services and consequently wouldn’t profit from a higher take-up rate.

It’s to give people choice – whether they’re moving house, looking to start working from home, or raising children who increasingly require and demand access to online services.

The relatively low take-up of Openreach fibre broadband certainly hasn’t deterred the company from continuing to set ambitious future targets.

By 2030, they hope to connect a further ten million premises.

This would be one of the fastest rollouts in Europe, though it’s a goal Openreach could comfortably meet simply by maintaining recent connection rates.

Progress will inevitably become harder as the proportion of remote unconnected properties increases, while the volume of relatively accessible urban areas continues to dwindle.

Nonetheless, we truly are living in a golden age in terms of line speeds, if nothing else.