During its first quarter financial results announcement, BT said that it has passed more than 25 million premises with its fiber broadband network, covering around 85% of the UK. In total, 90% of the UK can now get fibre broadband speeds from all networks, said BT. BT added that it is on track to help bring fibre to 95% of the country by the end of 2017, with plans to expand even further.
Taking into account EE's customer base, BT claims that it has added 214,000 retail fibre broadband customers in the quarter, bringing its fibre broadband customer base to 4.1 million. This means almost half of its retail broadband customers are now on fibre. The UK broadband market grew by 130,000 in the fourth quarter, of which BT's retail share accounted for 105,000 or 81%.
The largest operator in the UK is also trialing the G.fast technology in three locations, offering speeds of up to 330Mbps and it has a further two trials planned for 2016/17. BT's access networks business, Openreach will also be conducting two trials of business Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) in Bradford, providing ultrafast speeds of up to 1Gbps. BT's claims that its lab trials (conducted together with Bell Labs) of XG-FAST technology have achieved speeds of more than 5Gbps.
