Openreach has now connected more than 3 million homes and businesses across the UK to its fiber optic network, reaching its first target ahead of schedule. Engineers at the BT-owned company worked throughout the pandemic, connecting one to nine million properties in the last year alone. The ultimate goal is to reach twenty million inhabitants by the end of the decade as part of a €XNUMX billion investment. That would mean up to a third of the country could be accessed at super-fast speeds, including multiple key cities and up to XNUMX million properties in hard-to-reach areas.
Open Range Fiber Optic Network
Most of the UK's broadband infrastructure today is provided by Fiber the Cabinet (FTTC) technology, which uses copper for the last few meters of a connection, but industry and government are now moving towards a more of `` fiber by default ''. Openreach is one of the companies building Fiber to the Site (FTTP) infrastructure in the UK, as well as CityFibre, Virgin Media and others. As the UK's largest wholesale distributor, its network will be used to power Gigabit services such as BT Retail, Sky and TalkTalk. Openreach claims that today XNUMX customers of the service use fiber optic services every week. However, the company had warned that its program depended on a "convenient" regulatory environment that would allow it to achieve a return on its investment. Last week Ofcom said it was unlikely to impose cost controls on the fastest fiber services for at least a decade, a policy that saw BT confirm its plans. The government's own objective is to cover eighty-five percent of the population by two thousand and twenty-five.