In reply to a post by WWWombat:

I reckon that, while VM covers 48% of the country, around three-quarters of those people will have the choice of BT too.

My area and the areas around me that have had FTTC activated all have VERY wide Virgin Cable availability and the main 4 places I can think of include mine and the other 3 are neighbouring and all active so your probably right and I'm the remaining quarter.

In reply to a post by ian72:

If they won't installing in VM areas they would only cover half the country. However, VM being there (or any other high speed network) will impact the business case therefore the case has to be stronger.

Quite the opposite, winning a customer back from VM by deploying FTTC means more incremental revenue to Openreach, they get a fresh line rental customer. VM areas are more attractive to Openreach's commercial deployment as there's no captive audience paying them line rental whatever.