Network access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed the top locations for coverage of their Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in Oxfordshire (England), which sees the historic market town of Witney top the table with “nearly” 70% of all premises able to upgrade.
The operator claims to have so far invested more than £26 million to deploy their new network across Oxfordshire, which has already reached around 88,000 homes and businesses across the county. This works out at a per premises cost of roughly £295 and that’s in keeping with their current expectations. Build in the Oxford exchange area will start later this year.
Interestingly, Openreach also states that around 50% of all homes and businesses which have access to the new network in Oxfordshire have taken a service from a supporting ISP (e.g. BT, EE, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Zen Internet, iDNET, AAISP, Freeola and many.. more), which is well above their average UK FTTP take-up figure of c.34%.
Openreach’s partnership director for the South East, Kasam Hussain, said: “Our amazing engineers and build partners have done a wonderful job to help us reach this significant milestone. This Full Fibre upgrade is a huge boost for the county and the wider region. We’re adopting a balanced build, bringing ultrafast speeds to the region’s biggest cities and towns as well as the most rural communities.”
The catch with Openreach’s top ten list below is that the operator hasn’t included any other coverage figures for each location, which is relevant because some places – like Longworth – may be in the top list, but they actually only have around 20% coverage. Suffice to say, there’s still a lot of build left to do and this doesn’t factor in the efforts of their many rival networks.