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Openreach FTTP Reaches 80k Premises in Edinburgh

Edinburgh-Openreach-full-fibre

80,000 households in Edinburgh are now connected to Openreach’s gigabit-capable full-fibre network and able to access broadband speeds of up to 1,000Mbps.

Openreach announced this week that the rollout is complete in Abbeyhill, Corstorphine, Davidson’s Mains, Newington, Fairemilehead, Fountainbridge and Liberton and is also nearing completion in Colinton, Granton, Leith and Morningside.

Meanwhile, Openreach engineers are shortly to resume installations in Stockbridge and the West End, Craiglockhart and Portobello, with Maybury, West Edinburgh and the Waverley area to be connected later this year.

Robert Thorburn, Openreach’s Partnership Director for Scotland, said: “We’ve made great progress here in Edinburgh despite the challenges of Covid-19 restrictions, with 80,000 city households and businesses now able to connect to our new full fibre broadband network.

“Our rollout in Edinburgh offers these 80,000 homes and businesses access to the fastest, most reliable broadband available anywhere in the UK. That gives the city an economic edge for the recovery – so I’d urge people to check if they can upgrade now.”

Thorburn also suggested that Openreach’s copper broadband network in the city is “coming to the end of its working life” and “will eventually be switched off.”

Edinburgh was one of the first cities targeted by Openreach’s (BT) Fibre First deployment plan, which launched two years ago. The FTTP network currently reaches 2.75 million premises and, although work was paused this spring due to coronavirus, Openreach hopes to bring it to a total of 4.5 million addresses by March 2021. 

Openreach ultimately plans to spend £12 billion to connect 20 million households to its full-fibre network by the mid to late 2020s.

And it’s not just Openreach (through BT and Sky) offering gigabit speeds in the city. Virgin Media announced this week that 250,000 premises in Edinburgh will be shortly benefit from its gigabit-capable network upgrade, enabling them to receive speeds of up to 1104Mbps. CityFibre is also spending £100 million to install FTTP across Edinburgh, in partnership with Vodafone, while Hyperoptic has already connected some large apartment blocks in the city to its own FTTP network.

Lauren Smith
Lauren Smith

Lauren Smith has worked as a journalist and copywriter for most of the last decade, covering technology, energy, and consumer rights, in the US and UK.

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