Altnet Broadband ISP Lightning Fibre Expand FTTP Cover on CityFibre’s Network | ISPreview UK

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Eastbourne-based alternative broadband network and UK ISP Lightning Fibre, which is building a new gigabit speed full fibre (FTTP) service across parts of Sussex and Kent in England, has today announced that they’ve also expanded their existing wholesale partnership with CityFibre to help them reach “thousands of new premises” in towns across the South Coast of England.

The altnet, which has built to a number of locations like Eastbourne, Brighton and Hove, Worthing, Lancing, Hastings and St Leonards, Heathfield, Hellingly and Broad Oak, Hailsham and Polegate, originally planned to cover 140,000 premises with their gigabit-capable network. But it remains unclear how many premises they’ve reached, and they’ve since had to slow their network build due to various challenges (here and here).

NOTE: Lightning Fibre was acquired by existing backer Foresight Group in early 2024 and put under a new company called LF Holdco2 Ltd. The same group also backs other altnets, such as Connect Fibre and F&W Networks.

However, last year saw the provider join CityFibre’s national FTTP network in order to expand their off-net reach (here), although their initial coverage expansion under this agreement was limited to the Brighton & Hove and Worthing areas. But today’s announcement confirms an expansion of that partnership, which will “soon” see their retail broadband packages becoming available to premises in Polegate, Eastbourne and Hastings.

As a vertically integrated network operator with its own fibre network, Lightning Fibre said they would continue to use their own infrastructure where available. The wholesale agreement with CityFibre enables it to significantly expand its serviceable footprint, “enabling it to acquire new customers and retain more home movers” (reducing churn).

Rob Reaks, Chief Commercial Officer at Lightning Fibre, said:

“We are delighted to be able to extend our footprint by leveraging CityFibre’s robust infrastructure. This agreement will enable us to reach even more homes and businesses with ultrafast and ultra-reliable full fibre technology.”

George Wareing, Chief Sales Officer at CityFibre, added:

“It’s great to see Lightning Fibre build on their success over our network. With CityFibre infrastructure across the South East, they now have a far larger footprint over which to offer their services, and residents and businesses will now have an even greater choice of provider.”

Which? Reveals Best and Worst UK Areas for Mobile Signal via New MAP | ISPreview UK

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Consumer magazine Which? has today teamed up with crowdsourced network benchmarking firm Opensignal to produce a new UK map of mobile network quality. The map uses real-world data to create a percentage score for how consistent the signal is in each postcode area in the year to August 2025 – split by EE, O2, Three UK and Vodafone.

The map itself is said to be based on over 17 million network tests taken across the UK over the last 12 months from users of Opensignal apps, which is partly the same sort of data that was recently used to help create Ofcom’s new Map Your Mobile tool. The data unsurprisingly reveals that the quality of mobile coverage varies dramatically across the country, and this can be significantly impacted by your choice of mobile operator.

However, we must also remember that mobile network coverage and performance remains a difficult thing to study, not least because end-users are always moving through different areas (indoor, outdoor and underground), using different devices with different capabilities and the surrounding environment is ever changeable (weather, trees, buildings etc.).

All of the above can impact signal quality, and that’s before we even consider any differences in local network (backhaul) capacity or spectrum usage between mast locations (cell sites). But despite this, Which?’s study of the new map and data was able to reveal that postcodes in Wales and the South West (England) were rated as having the “patchiest and most unreliable mobile experiences” in the UK.

For example, SA70 in Tenby – a popular seaside tourist destination – was named the worst postcode for mobile network quality. Mobile users only experienced a good connection 54.3% of the time (i.e. 38% on Three UK, 45% on O2, 63% on Vodafone and 71% on EE).

On the flip side, SE11 in London delivered the best postcode score of 87.8% (i.e. EE + Vodafone on 90%, Three UK on 86% and O2 on 85%), but it was closely tied with NG3 in Nottingham. It’s no surprise that the big urban areas typically achieve the best mobile signals.

Which?'s Best-and-Worst-UK-Postcode-Districts-for-Mobile-Quality-2025

The map itself colour codes each postcode district to show which mobile operator delivered the best network signal (i.e. EE is a darker green, Vodafone is red, Three UK is purple and O2 is a dark blue), although sadly it doesn’t allow users to split the results by mobile broadband technology (e.g. 4G vs 5G).

Finally, we must remember that signal quality doesn’t always reflect the data / broadband performance of an operator. Sometimes you can have an excellent signal, but still get slow data speeds, such as due to limits on local capacity etc.

Which?’s Mobile Quality Map
https://www.which.co.uk/…/mobile-phone-coverage-map

UK ISP Zen Internet Boost Core Network with 400Gbps Neos Networks Link | ISPreview UK

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Connectivity provider Neos Networks, which runs one of the biggest 34,000km long and 400Gbps capable business fibre networks in the UK – spanning 550 exchanges, 90+ data centres and 600+ Points of Presence (PoPs), has boosted their partnership with broadband ISP Zen Internet by providing a 400Gbps upgrade between Manchester and London.

The “strategic upgrade” is said to be designed to ensure that Zen’s core network is ready for the future, while also supporting the UK’s growing bandwidth requirements as data centre investment, AI adoption, and full fibre broadband rollouts increase across the nation.

Beyond the Manchester to London link, Zen also continues to benefit from Neos’s upgraded core and exchange-backhaul services, which are said to be “critical for delivering ultrafast, resilient connectivity“. Together, these investments should support Zen’s ongoing efforts toward making quality fibre networks and services more widely available to UK businesses and consumers.

David Bruce, CRO at Neos Networks, said:

“Our long-standing partnership with Zen Internet highlights the vital role of advanced fibre infrastructure when it comes to meeting the UK’s AI ambitions. Zen’s mission to become the country’s leading altnet aggregator is well aligned with the breadth, quality, and reliability of our backbone networks, and by working together, we’re ensuring an ecosystem that will ultimately benefit the UK as a whole.”

John Lyons, Technical Director at Zen Internet, said:

“In Neos we have a partner that not only delivers robust, high-capacity network solutions, but also real agility and collaboration, helping us deliver for our end users. Our collaboration is built on open communication, rapid provisioning, and shared engineering standards like equipment duplication, diverse routing, and true east-west redundancy. This approach means we can rely on Neos to deliver a network that consistently meets the high standards our customers expect”.

The upgrade may also help to complement Zen’s new Fibre Hub, which essentially aggregates access to a number of major and smaller alternative full fibre broadband networks for their partners (e.g. ISPs) to harness.

Wi-Fi Alliance Launch New Certification for Smart Home and IoT Devices | ISPreview UK

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The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched a new “Wi-Fi for Matter” certification for Smart Home and IoT (Internet of Things) products, which is intended to help consumers and manufacturers identify when a particular device supports a key set of features – delivering a stronger level of confidence in their capabilities.

Several existing Wi-Fi Alliance certifications have actually been combined to deliver the new Wi-Fi for Matter certification. These all meet the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s (CSA) baseline Wi-Fi requirements for Matter certification. The access point (AP) focused certification currently consists of the following elements:

NOTE: The Wi-Fi for Matter certification also has support for battery operated devices (useful for IoT / sensors kit etc.).

Wi-Fi for Matter (Core Certification Requirements)

➤ Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6

➤ Extended Sleep

➤ IPv4 Proxy Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)

➤ IPv6 Proxy Neighbour Discovery Protocol (NDP)

The new device certification also adds WPA3 security, and supports the life of IoT devices with improved power management requirements. Wi-Fi Certified devices should be able to conserve energy and maintain a connection with the access point. In addition, Matter Network Infrastructure Managers (NIMs) are supported with extended sleep, ARP, and NDP features.

All of this is broadly intended to support the CSA’s new technical ‘Matter‘ standard for smart home and IoT devices. The goal of this is to improve interoperability and compatibility between different manufacturers and security, while always allowing local (off-line) control as an option. Spreading that to WiFi is thus of key importance, as this is often used for network connectivity. Credits to one of our readers (Steve) for spotting this development.

Ofcom Publishes 2025 UK Report on Openreach’s Independence | ISPreview UK

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The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today published their annual 2025 monitoring report into Openreach’s independence from BT, which found only a “low number of breaches of compliance” and noted that, overall, “compliance appears to be well-established and well-embedded“.

Just to recap. The annual report (PDF) process was established some years ago as part of Ofcom’s effort to monitor Openreach’s progress toward becoming a distinct “legally separate” company away from BT, which in turn stemmed from the original 2016 Strategic Review of Digital Communications (full summary). The report also covers compliance with the regulator’s last fixed telecoms market review for the 2021-26 period (here).

NOTE: Openreach is investing up to £15bn to ensure that 25 million premises (80%+ of the UK) are covered by their full fibre broadband network by Dec 2026 (currently at well over 15m), before reaching up to 30m by 2030.

The 2016 review concluded that Openreach previously had an “incentive to make decisions in the interests of BT, rather than BT’s competitors, which can lead to competition problems” and that BT had failed to “sufficiently” consult rival ISPs, such as those that piggyback off their network, on future “investment plans that affect them.” They were also deemed to have under-invested in their network.

In response, BT and Ofcom reached a voluntary agreement in 2017 (here), which sought to boost competition by giving rivals easier access to the operator’s infrastructure and fostering an independent governance structure for Openreach. On top of that there were also tougher minimum service quality standards, separate branding, new consumer protection measures and better information sharing etc.

Since then much has changed and the operator is now rolling out FTTP broadband to an additional 1 million+ premises per quarter (total of c.20 million premises now passed), while enabling rivals to harness their cable ducts and poles with much greater ease.

Fibre build by rival networks has so far led to a significant increase in the number of premises with a choice of network, with 74% of premises now having access to at least two networks (one network from another provider in addition to Openreach), and 27% of premises have access to at least three networks as of January 2025.

Ofcom’s annual monitoring reports on all this have thus been fairly uneventful for the past few years, and 2025 is no exception.

Ofcom Statement

Since our last report, we have observed that the Commitments continue to be working well. We have seen BT and Openreach continue to demonstrate compliance with the Commitments in a proactive and vigilant manner. We have had positive levels of engagement with both organisations and the importance of the OMU’s work is well understood. From our monitoring activities, compliance with the Commitments appears to be well-established and well-embedded across both organisations.

We have also engaged with industry stakeholders throughout the year and welcomed their views on whether BT and Openreach are complying with the Commitments and the WFTMR. Although stakeholders did not raise specific concerns about the overall effectiveness of the Commitments, some expressed concerns that certain Openreach operational processes and decisions have the potential to raise issues in relation to its Commitments obligations. Examples include the exchange exit programme and the Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) rollout. We will continue to monitor these issues closely and welcome continued insights from stakeholders as these programmes progress.

Over the last year, BT and Openreach’s respective Commitments monitoring offices each reported a low number of internal breaches of compliance with the Commitments by BT and Openreach employees. We considered these breaches both individually and taken together. We concluded that their low-risk nature and overall level do not call into question whether the Commitments overall are working as intended.

Each of the breaches was promptly detected and corrected. We have observed that when a breach has occurred, regardless of the risk level or nature of the breach, both Openreach and BT have adopted a thorough approach to investigating what happened and considered taking remedial steps to address or remedy the breach. This is consistent with the approach we have seen them take in previous years and we expect this to continue in the event of any future breaches.

Although we have not opened any new formal investigations following the reporting of breaches to us by BT and Openreach over the last year, we have continued to carefully scrutinise matters reported to us to ensure there is no complacency, and we remain ready to hold BT and Openreach to account when necessary.

One crucial thing to point out is that Ofcom are currently in the process of conducting a new Telecoms Access Review 2026 (TAR), which will set out revised rules and regulations for the fixed broadband and telecoms market – particularly Openreach – to cover the next 5-year period from 2026 to 2031. The outcome of this is due soon and so the regulator’s next annual monitoring report in 2026 is likely to be of greater interest.

ISP Zen Internet Acquire Fibrehop’s UK Consumer Broadband Base | ISPreview UK

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Rochdale-based UK broadband ISP Zen Internet has today revealed that they’ve acquired the consumer customer base of Fibrehop. The development came to light as part of Richard Tang’s (Zen’s CEO) latest interview with the boss of business connectivity provider Triangle Networks, Paul Anslow – the now former owner of Fibrehop.

At the time of writing we don’t have any solid details on the agreement itself (financial or otherwise) or know how many customers are involved in this transaction. But Fibrehop was known as a relatively small provider that primarily sold full fibre (FTTP) broadband packages to consumers via CityFibre’s network.

According to the new interview, Triangle Networks have decided that being a consumer broadband provider isn’t the right approach for them and they’ve thus opted to re-focus back toward their business base.

We realised [about 18 months ago] that we wanted to provide a really good quality of service, but to do that at scale … is a lot harder than people think it would be,” said Paul about their Fibrehop decision. “I feel that if we’d of gone for a more mass market appeal, we would have eroded that [existing quality].”

Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet, said:

“We’re very much looking forward to welcoming Fibrehop’s customers over the coming weeks.

We don’t do any mid-contract price hikes or impose a loyalty penalty on our customers.

We’re looking forward to providing a really really good service to you.”

The full interview can be found below, and no doubt Fibrehop’s customers will soon be notified with more details of the planned migration.

Watch this space: DE-CIX planning orbital Internet Exchange | Total Telecom

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blue and purple galaxy digital wallpaper

News

The Space-IX initiative will work to outline how best to connect the ever-growing orbital infrastructure ecosystem

This week, the world’s largest Internet Exchange (IX) operator, Germany’s DE-CIX, has announced it is setting its future goals sky-high – literally. With its new Space-IX initiative, the Frankfurt-based company says it is not only exploring how best to provide interconnect services to orbiting satellites, but even the merits of putting IX infrastructure itself into space.

The goal of the project, as outlined on the company website, Is to ‘enable intelligent interconnection between LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites and ensure efficient integration with terrestrial infrastructure, cloud platforms, and content providers’.

“Wherever networks are created, interconnection should follow,” says Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. “We’ve spent 30 years building the backbone of the Internet here on Earth. Now we’re bringing that same neutral, high-performance interconnection model to the next layer of digital infrastructure, above the clouds and to the stars.”

LEO satellites, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, are playing an increasingly large role in the global connectivity ecosystem, delivering connectivity to places hard to reach for traditional, terrestrial infrastructure. However, interconnection with terrestrial networks can be challenging, particular when delivering latency-sensitive services.

As a result, DE-CIX is increasingly focussing on connecting to satellites using emerging technologies. For example, as part of the European Space Agency’s OFELIAS project, DE-CIX is collaborating with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to explore laser-based communications between satellites and ground stations. These optical data links are becoming increasingly popular for intersatellite communication, offering significantly higher data rates and lower latency than traditional radio frequency links. Connecting satellites to Earth via laser, however, is more complicated, requiring smarter protocols and algorithms overcome cloud cover and atmospheric interference.

But what if we could remove the need to beam some of that data back to Earth entirely? This is the core premise behind the idea of launching orbital data centres, both for compute and storage purposes. Such deployments would have some attractive advantages, including access to near-limitless solar energy and server racks being cooled by the vacuum of space. On the other hand, launch costs for such infrastructure is still largely prohibitive, and maintaining or upgrading the physical equipment would require a significant leap in autonomous robotics technology.

Nonetheless, the global tech industry is taking this possibility very seriously; Axiom Space, for example, have announced plans to launch their first two Orbital Data Center (ODC) nodes before the end of 2025.

For DE-CIX, this seemingly inevitable deployment of yet more satellites and space-based data centres will necessitate a seismic change in IX architecture.

“As satellites become part of the digital supply chain, whether delivering broadband to underserved communities, powering AI for businesses, or enabling orbital analytics, we need an architecture that unites space and Earth into one seamless ecosystem,” said Ivanov. “This collaboration is the very beginning of our answer to that challenge.

In related news, last month DE-CIX added Starlink to its interconnection system in India, becoming the first IX platform in the world to do so.

Also in the news:
US judge rules Huawei must face charges of fraud and racketeering
Optus ditches football rights to focus on telecoms
Nokia launches digital twin platform Enscryb to digitalise energy sector

Telco transformation and the AI efficiency imperative | Total Telecom

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Interview

We caught up with Joaquim Croca, Senior Vice President at global engineering and technology company Cyient, to discuss the pressures facing telcos and their automation journey

For the most part, the 2020s have not been a kind to telco network operators, particularly in Europe. The start of the decade saw them racing to pour billions of euros into their new fibre and 5G networks, betting heavily on the ‘build it and they will come’ mantra made famous by the 1989 film Field of Dreams.

Unfortunately for telcos in 2025, the resulting environment has proven less a field of dreams than a quagmire.

Traditional revenues have remained relatively flat for years in both the fixed and mobile sectors, often bogged down by heavy-handed regulation and fierce competition. At the same time, new revenue streams at scale remain elusive, despite the vastly improved technical capabilities of these new networks.

Against this challenging backdrop, as Cyient’s Senior Vice President Joaquim Croca points out, operational efficiency has never been more important.

“Telco business is fighting not to get fully commoditized,” said Croca. “All of the operators are looking towards becoming more streamlined, more cost-efficient… It’s a matter of survival.”

AI: Unlocking efficiency

At the heart of this drive for efficiency is the rapid evolution of AI in recent years, enabling a level of automation previously unattainable. Today, advanced AI analytics can rapidly compile data from numerous siloes into actionable data points, pre-empting network incidents and triaging problems in real time. Meanwhile, specially designed AI agents can work alongside network engineers, responding to queries in plain language and autonomously making resolving issues.

“AI is no longer just a buzzword; it’s starting to prove its value,” said Croca. “The question of 2025 is really: how can I use AI to release human intelligence to go and do something else?”

“We have been using AI for many years, but now it’s at the forefront of conversations with our customers. They want to know how much AI we are bringing to help overcome their challenges,” he continued.

For Cyient, this concept of freeing engineers to perform more high value tasks is at the core of their VISMON™ platform, a suite of AI-driven tools that enable zero-touch, closed-loop network automation, from planning and deployment through to optimisation and operations. According to the company, this platform is already delivering reductions in network operation time and resources by up to 40% and saving engineers numerous hours every day through autonomous site management.

“Our VISMON platform has been around for 20 years, evolving alongside the industry,” said Croca. “We have a stream of AI-powered scripts that are looking at how the network is performing, what are the issues, what are the fake alerts… ensuring we only call in the network engineer when it’s absolutely necessary.”

Increasing market complexity

In addition to automating network operations directly, part of what makes AI-powered OSS so effective is the smoother integration of these networks within the wider telco operating environment.

In recent years, an increasingly popular monetisation strategy for telcos has been to spin off their infrastructure, aiming to offload some of the operational complexity and serving to attract fresh investment. This, the telcos argue, will allow them to streamline their service operations and better focus on their customers. However, as Croca highlights, this type of fragmentation is making the telco market even more complex.

“We’ve seen a major trend of operators splitting between infracos, netcos, surfcos, etc. It’s all driven by the financial incentive,” explained Croca. “But this approach also creates a more complicated ecosystem. In Europe there are dozens of operators, each of which can divide into two or three different entities, each with their own processes and relationships. It rapidly becomes a very complex world.”

Handling this complexity on an international scale requires careful data management, another area where AI can perform. In a partnership announced this summer, Vodafone is using VISMON for just this purpose, helping to harmonise its network operations across its numerous markets. The platform provides unified network visibility across Vodafone’s markets, enabling them to benchmark configurations, detect anomalies, and track deployments.

The benefits are significant. According to the partners, their collaboration is delivering a 70% reduction in time spent compiling cross-market reports and three times faster decision-making. They also expect to see a 50% decrease in errors caused by inconsistent configuration.

“VISMON provides the strategic foundation to oversee configuration data across all markets, enabling us to harmonize practices, identify best-performing setups, and optimize our networks more effectively than ever,” said Mostafa Noureldien, Manager, Network Development Digital Strategy at Vodafone in the company release.

“We are already deploying AI NOC (Network Operations Centre) agents and rollout agents across two of Vodafone’s operations,” added Croca. “These are fully autonomous and very intelligent. They bring a big gain not just in efficiency but in quality, in terms of First Time Right and First Time Resolved. We’re delivering much faster resolutions to network issues.”

The road towards fully autonomous networks

Of course, the long-term dream for telcos is full network autonomy, requiring the bare minimum of human oversight. For Croca, this goal remains firmly on the horizon due to challenges both technical and philosophical.

“We are still going through existential doubts around how much of the network and its operations can be handed over to AI. There are technical questions and regulatory questions to be addressed, so we will be handing over the reins gradually,” he explained.

Nonetheless, the industry is making blistering progress, with Croca highlighting the need for effective and agile leadership in this rapidly changing landscape.

“To succeed, you need to find the CEOs and CFOs that are really driving new ways of operating, as well as finding some evangelist CTOs that are very keen to look at things in a different perspective,” said Croca. “It’s not just about technological maturity, but our own mindset towards embracing it.”

Find out more about Cyient and the journey towards autonomous networks here

Also in the news:
US judge rules Huawei must face charges of fraud and racketeering
Optus ditches football rights to focus on telecoms
Nokia launches digital twin platform Enscryb to digitalise energy sector

Quickline Extend East Yorkshire FTTP Broadband Cover by 8,500 Premises | ISPreview UK

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Rural UK ISP Quickline, which is busy rolling out their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across rural parts of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in England (3-Year Rollout Plan), has revealed that their deployment in East Yorkshire has now covered around 8,500 premises in East Riding.

Just to recap. The provider has so far secured several Project Gigabit deployment contracts for the West Yorkshire and the York area (Lot 8), North Yorkshire (Lot 31) and East Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (Lot 23) under the Project Gigabit scheme (here, here and here). This reflects a total public investment of around £300m to help expand their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network into disadvantaged areas.

NOTE: Quickline is also supported by a private investment of £500m from Northleaf Capital Partners, plus c.£225m in term loans and debt guarantees from the National Wealth Fund (NWF) and a £25m term loan from NatWest.

In today’s case, we’re talking about their £118.9m East Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (Lot 23) contract, which was announced back in July 2024 and aims to reach around 72,000 additional premises over the next few years. Quickline has now delivered gigabit-capable broadband to around 8,500 homes and businesses across the East Riding area, with a “portion enabled through Project Gigabit funding” (they don’t state the portion size, but we assume the rest is their commercial build).

In the North Cave area, to the west of Hull, more than 800 homes now have gigabit-capable connectivity, with Broomfleet, Ellerker, Newport and Hotham all live, along with parts of North Cave itself. In Holme-Upon-Spalding-Moor, over 1,100 homes and businesses can now connect to Quickline’s full fibre network and another 600 addresses are now being served in Patrington.

Earlier this summer, Gilberdyke, west of North Cave, went live, giving more than 1,350 homes and businesses access to gigabit speeds. The hamlet of Newport also benefited, with more than 700 addresses able to get connected and the rollout to the remaining 10 per cent of the village due soon.

Lauren Robson, Project Manager at Quickline, said:

“I’m thrilled to see such strong progress across the region. Some truly rural communities are now receiving service thanks to the Project Gigabit contract being delivered by Quickline, and it’s making a real difference.

Our outreach activity in these communities is a hugely important part of our mission, ensuring we not only provide the means for decent connectivity, we also help to educate and inform at the same time by engaging with different groups and organisations.

Our aim is simple – to lift people out of digital poverty by giving them the connectivity they deserve. I’m proud to be part of that, alongside the wider Quickline team.”

Over the next three years, Quickline’s rollout is aiming to extend gigabit-capable broadband to a further 360,000 premises across thousands of rural communities (roughly 170k via state aid projects and almost 200k from commercial builds). To date, the company has already invested more than £107m into rural areas. But before that the provider expects to end 2025 with a total of 200,000 premises passed.

Residential customers reached by their new full fibre network are typically charged from £22 per month on a 24-month term for 100Mbps (50Mbps upload) speeds with free installation, which goes up to £49 for their top 1000Mbps symmetric speed tier (you also get the first 8 months of service for free on their top tier).

Openreach to Start Exiting Next 12 UK Exchanges in Q3 2025-26 | ISPreview UK

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Network access provider Openreach (BT) has revealed to broadband ISPs that they will begin the next phase of their UK exchange closure programme in Q3 2025/26 (i.e. roughly this time next year), which will impact a further 12 exchanges. This follows their initial closure pilot with 3 exchanges (Deddington, Ballyclare and Kenton Road), which has nearly completed.

The operator currently has around 5,600 UK exchanges, but only c. 1,000 of those are used to provide nationwide coverage of modern “fibre broadband” based services (FTTC, FTTP etc.) – the Openreach Handover Points (OHPs). However, the rollout of full fibre (FTTP), combined with the retirement of copper lines and legacy services (ADSL, WLR etc.), will make it economically unviable to support both the old and new exchanges.

NOTE: Openreach previously predicted that, come 2025, the number of copper broadband customers being served by the old 4,600 exchanges will fall to just 1 million.

The operator thus has a long-term plan for closing the other 4,600 exchanges – known as the Exchange Exit Programme, which starts with their initial pilot of 3 exchanges (see above) and then extends to a closure of 105 “priority exchanges” by 2030 (i.e. taking place in 4 phases over the next 5 years), with the rest gradually following through the early 2030s.

Openreach has now confirmed (credits to Thinkbroadband) that the next 12 exchanges to begin the exit process will include the following sites from Q3 2025/26. In theory, all of these sites should then reach their Network Closure point by April 2028 and be completely closed by September 2028. Openreach has in fact also revealed details of all the Phases for their initial batch of 108 exchange closures – here (Excel sheet).

Phase 1 – Exchange Exit Programme
Staines
Thames Ditton
Baynard
Wraysbury
Nazeing
Langford
Allestree Park
Beacon
Childwall
Lundin Links
Carrickfergus
Glengormley

Take note that closing an exchange and migrating affected customers is a highly complex process, which typically takes around 4-7 years (varying by the complexity of each exchange) – starting with a Stop Sell of old products and eventually ending with everything being switched off (Openreach and ISPs then remove their physical equipment over the remaining months to ultimately vacate the building).

The other phases are currently dated as follows, but these timings should perhaps be considered tentative (subject to change).

Phase 2 (Closure by April 2029)

WEWBLO Howland Street
LSWAN Wandsworth
CLMON Monument
LNLVY Lea Valley
WEWNPN North Paddington
WRPIM Pimlico
LWUXB Uxbridge
LNEDM Edmonton
EAGRA Grays Thurrock
CLNEW New Cross
LSWOO Woolwich
NDMED Chatham
WSMOT Motherwell
SDWTHDN Brighton Withdean
LSSUN Sunbury
WMHX Headless Cross
CLSOU Southwark
MRBRA Bramhall
SLDCN Doncaster North
WRKGDN Kensington Garden

Phase 3 (Closure by April 2030)

SWPN Pontypridd
CLHOL Holborn
WEWMAY Mayfair
LWWEM Wembley
CLWAP Wapping
CMMLD Midland
LSPUR Purley
WEWPAD Paddington
ESCRA Edinburgh Craiglockhart
SSLON Long Ashton
LSMOG Mogador
WRSKEN South Kensington
CLSHO Shoreditch
LWPIN Pinner
LSWEY Weybridge
LWSKY Skyport
THAD Aldershot
LNCED Crouch End
LSSTR Streatham
EMSOSHM Somersham
LWCHI Chiswick
LNSTF Stratford
LSCTHM Caterham
LSESH Esher
LNFIN Finchley
WMWR Worcester
LSFARB Farnborough; Kent
LSNCHM North Cheam
WEWBAY Bayswater
EAHTF Hertford
WEWPRI Primrose Hill

Phase 4 (Closure by Dec 2030)

LVCEN Liverpool Central
LSBKM Bookham
THHN Headley Down
EARDH Ramsden Heath
CMDD Dudley; West Midlands
WWSOME Somerton
LVGAT Gateacre
EABRI Brightlingsea
EACHF Chafford
LWHARR Harrow
WSPRO Glasgow Provanmill
NDNEI Newick
SMHGN Holmer Green
CMWDGT Woodgate
SMLEA Leagrave
WWMSMT Mawnan Smith
NESU Sunderland
SLHX Haxey
LWHOU Hounslow
MRCHI Chinley
LSRIC Richmond Kew; Surrey
SSSHM Shepton Mallet
SDBRCKL Bracklesham Bay
WWWBAY Widemouth
MYRPP Ripponden
EAWRI Writtle
WNM Mold
SSSOF Stratton On The Fosse
THIP Iver
LVAUG Aughton Green
LSBET Betchworth
SDWSWND Worthing Swandean
CMKNO Knowle
THBW Blackwater
EMCOGEN Cogenhoe
NDGUE Guestling
NDOTF Otford
LWCHO Chorleywood
WWCHEL Chelston
MYADD Addingham
NDSHO Shorne
LSKIN KINGSTON SSC (Taverner House)

Check out the full excel sheet, as linked earlier, for extra details on each.