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BT injects £50m into patching up £2.5bn fibre rollout

BT will make a second pass on locations that it hasn't managed to deliver fibre to in previous attempts.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

BT will inject an additional £50m into its £2.5bn fibre rollout, which should bring higher speed broadband to a further 400,000 premises.

As well as fibre to the premises (FTTP) for new homes in the cities, the investment will cover additional fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) deployments to serve apartment blocks. It will also reach city cabinets that couldn't previously be enabled due to technical obstacles or local planning restrictions.

All of the premises targeted for investment will see fibre connections of 80Mbps. BT said 30 cities will be covered by the investment, but told ZDNet it's too early to say which cities will make the cut as more planning and surveying is needed.

Mike Galvin, MD of network investment at Openreach said the telco that has to take its fibre rollout to areas that have been missed in earlier phases of the deployment.

"Some city areas have proved challenging in the past but we are returning to those and will pass hundreds of thousands of additional premises with fibre," he said.

The telco is investing £2.5bn on its UK-wide fibre rollout, which passes 18 million premises. There are currently five million fibre subscribers in the UK, according to the company.

BT itself last October had 1.7 million retail fibre customers, and is deploying three million kilometres of fibre and 50,000 new cabinets under its mixed FTTC and FTTP rollout, expected to be completed by mid-2014.

BT has also been the primary contractor for the central and local government funded Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme.

BT said fibre under BDUK will cover around 90 per cent by late 2015 or early 2016.

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