When Openreach first launched its Fibre First FTTP campaign, the company hoped to be able to supply a million homes and business with ultrafast broadband. With things moving along nicely, Openreach has made the surprising move to up their promise of a million to three million by 2020.
Openreach’s chief executive Clive Selley, says that the initiative will set the company on course for last year’s target of 10 million homes and businesses by 2025.
Openreach has stated the eight cities benefiting from this initiative will be Manchester, Leeds, London, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Cardiff, and Edinburgh. From the 3 million homes and business, 500,000 new builds and 300,000 rural homes and businesses.
Amazingly enough, Openreach has considered some rural areas into their plans, which is surprising due to rural residents often feeling left out of the ever-so-quick development urban eras experience. However, many celebrations aren’t to be had. Findings show that when the average household cost of FTTP is compared, rural homes will acquire a heftier bill than those in urban areas.
The Fibre First initiative will hire a total of 3,000 engineers, which will then be deployed to the eight major cities Openreach plans to develop. Although Clive Selley refused to state how much the program will cost, an investigation from The Register found that the total cost will be somewhere between £3b and £6b.
In order to regain costs, the group has planned to move new customers in the FTTP targeted cities straight over to Fibre and shut down their copper networks. This move will result in the average customer’s bill rising by up to £7 per month. In addition to that, Clive Selley also says that FTTP will be more cost effective since Fibre is considerably easier to maintain when compared to their current copper network.
With a combination of VoIP and FTTP, not only will you and your business benefit from having a more reliable and faster network than FTTC, ( Fun fact : FTTP speeds of up to 330Mbps equates to 3300 concurrent VoIP calls) but you will experience reduced chances of physical line degradation, packet loss; which is known to severely reduce call quality and due Fibre’s use of light signals, you will also benefit from protection when lighting strikes.
With select locations already having FTTP available, please enquire with us as to how Packnet can supply your business with FTTP. And if FTTP isn’t yet available to your location, you are welcome to contact us once it is.
