Top 20 Full Fibre Broadband Networks by Estimated UK Coverage – H2 2024 UPDATE

New data from Thinkbroadband has provided an updated independent assessment of how big – in terms of network coverage (premises passed) – the top 20 largest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks in the UK have become by the end of July 2024. In this article, we compare that data against official coverage claims.

One of the challenges with keeping tabs on the rapid UK growth of full fibre broadband networks is that some network operators often make coverage claims that are difficult to independently verify. This is relevant because we’ve often times found that the official “premises passed” figures put out by some providers may not entirely reflect reality.

For example, in some cases those figures could include part-built networks that aren’t fully live yet and, in other cases, the network may be technically built, but customers in some of the covered areas won’t be able to get it ordered or installed by an ISP (i.e. not yet truly “Ready for Service” – RFS). Similarly, in a smaller number of cases, operators can sometimes make mistakes in their data (example).

The latest State of Broadband Report (July 2024) from TBB is thus very useful because we get an up-to-date run-down of how much coverage has been independently verified to exist (RFS) across the largest alternative network (altnet) operators in the full fibre space. We can then compare TBB’s data with the official coverage claims from operators.

Naturally, there are a few caveats to consider when doing this, which need to be reflected for the proper context. Firstly, TBB is not perfect, and they do sometimes miss bits and pieces of network coverage (please email them if you spot this). Secondly, conducting independent analysis of network builds like this is slow and laborious work, thus over the years we’ve tended to perceive that TBB’s latest data can be 2-3 months behind actual build.

Such a time lag, which is likely to vary between operators, may not seem like much, but it can create disproportionately large gaps between independent and official figures. Big gaps are most likely to occur during the early ramp-up phase of a new network build, where smaller networks may go from having a few tens of thousands of premises passed to hundreds of thousands and all within the space of a year (some networks are still in this phase).

Suffice to say, it’s wise not to make the mistake of automatically inferring that a big gap is because an altnet may be overstating their coverage. In addition, we’ve also dated the official claims below as most operators only very occasionally provide an update on their build progress and some haven’t done one in a long time, which will thus be out of step with TBB’s latest modelling.

Top 20 Largest UK Full Fibre Networks by Coverage – July 2024

As usual, we aren’t going to micro analyse each operator above, but most of TBB’s real-world focused estimates of Ready for Service (RFS) coverage are roughly where we’d expect them to be when compared with official claims. But there are a few caveats to point out above for certain operators.

Firstly, Virgin Media’s network is currently in the middle of a major upgrade, which is seeing XGS-PON based FTTP being deployed into areas that could previously only access their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network. Currently, it’s a little bit difficult to track these XGS areas, and thus TBB has only included the figure for their older Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFOG) based FTTP build.

Meanwhile, the nexfibre build is technically a separate company and so gets its own entry, despite only selling packages via Virgin Media. The official nexfibre figures also haven’t yet been updated to add 175,000 premises from Upp’s recent merger, but that should happen soon. Officially, Virgin Media and Nexfibre claim to have passed a total of 5 million premises with FTTP.

Elsewhere, Netomnia and Brsk are in the process of merging, thus in the future they’ll combine and would be today delivering around 1.6m premises passed – putting them above CommunityFibre in the above table. As for CityFibre, it’s currently unclear whether TBB’s figure of 3.8m has included their recent acquisition of Lit Fibre or not (technically Lit’s premises have yet to be integrated into City’s network).

The table this time also includes the additions of F&W Networks, Grain, AllPoints Fibre (this largely reflects the combination of Jurassic Fibre, Swish Fibre and Giganet) and MS3. Finally, it’s important to remember that a lot of these FTTP operators are overbuilding rivals in different parts of the country, particularly dense urban locations. But if we were to just look at the UK coverage of alternative networks (excluding Openreach, Virgin Media and KCOM) then they’d reach 35.9% of premises (up from 30.78% in Jan 2024).

UPDATE 12:54pm

We’ve been sent a corrected figure for CityFibre, which is now 3.4m instead of 3.8m. Apparently the report used 3.8m due to a typo when transcribing rounded figures, which meant 3.38m became 3.8m. In short, they haven’t included the Lit Fibre base into the total, which is the only way we could have seen them hitting 3.8m so quickly.