More full fibre is always good and with Openreach racing towards its four million premises passed footprint deadline of March 2021 the news today that 250,000 of these premises will be in various rural areas of the UK is welcome.
The 227 areas are on top of the 13 areas announced in Autumn 2019 and in those areas the builds are well under way and for the 227 areas in the long list today the build work is due to start in the next 14 months.
“Our full fibre build programme is going great guns – having passed over 2 million premises already on the way to our 4m target by March 2021. We’re now building at around 26,000 premises a week in over 100 locations – reaching a new home or business every 23 seconds. That’s up from 13,000 premises a week this time last year. Openreach has always been committed to doing our bit in rural Britain – delivering network upgrades in communities that are harder to reach and less densely populated. We intend to build a significant portion of our full-fibre network in these harder to reach areas of the UK and are announcing 227 locations today. Our ambition is to reach 15 million premises by mid-2020s if right investment conditions are in place. Currently, the biggest missing piece of this puzzle is getting an exemption from business rates on building fibre cables which is critical for any fibre builder’s long-term investment case.”
