BT adds 1.2m premises to fibre broadband roll-out

BT has confirmed a further 1.2 million homes and businesses will be able to access its fibre broadband network.

The telecoms giant is part-way through a £2.5bn roll-out it announced in 2010 to bring this technology to 66% of the population by the end of spring 2014.

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This latest phase has the same deadline and will take the number of premises with access to the network to 19 million.

A total of 99 exchanges will be updated with fibre connectivity over the next year, mostly across Scotland, the Midlands, the North East and the North West of England, bringing 600,000 homes and business access.

However, BT admitted “current network topography and the economics of deployment” – i.e. whether it is economically viable for BT to pay to roll out to rural areas with fewer customers – would mean not everyone connected to the exchanges could get fibre.

The other 600,000 premises will come from “infill work” to bring already announced locations up to scratch with BT’s latest technology.

“The UK is making great progress with superfast broadband and this latest phase of work will keep up the momentum,” said Mike Galvin, managing director of next-generation access at BT Openreach.

“I am sure that communities across the UK will be pleased to see that they are factored into our commercial plans and I now look forward to working with councils to identify further areas that we can enable with their support.”

Once connected, the network will be able to offer speeds ranging from up to 80Mbps for fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) deployments or up to 330Mbps for connections directly to the home or fibre to the premises (FTTP).

As well as its own commercial roll-out, BT is heavily involved in the government's Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme to bring superfast broadband to 90% of the UK by 2015 and offer a minimum of 2Mbps to everyone else.

It has won a number of contracts from local councils, including Norfolk, Cumbria and North Yorkshire, although it has drawn criticism for being one of only two providers able to bid on the lucrative contracts.