Full fibre (FTTP) availability

I've just check the Openreach fibre checker site if FTTP is available in my address.

And the search results states "Available to order now - Full Fibre Broadband, Up to 1600 Mbps download speed and Up to 115 Mbps upload speed"

If I check on the Zen broadband checker, they only offer Unlimited Fibre 2 (Which I'm already on, inc. digital voice) or I can fill a form to be notified when Full Fibre is available.

Why am I not able to see full fibre on the Zen site.

Edited by knight01 (Sun 23-Aug-26 22:24:51)

I suggest that your ring Zen and ask them.

The usual explanation is a database update delay; typical when FTTP has only recently become available at the property.

It can take a little while for the updates to propagate along to the various provider databases.

Call them as noted.

Agree; I saw Openreach working on fibres in the street. It was a few days before the OR site showed available, and a good few more before my provider (PlusNet) offered me a FTTC > FTTP "upgrade"

That's probably it, the address will probably take time to update on the Zen side.

In the meantime (until my address is updated on Zen side), I'll have to figure out where to have the ONT installed, may have to ask Zen if it's possible to run the fibre outdoors along the wall to first floor to my Fritzbox. I don't have a power socket near my front door.

My Openreach fibre cable runs round the side of my bungalow below the back door, goes through the soffit into the attic and ends at the ONT which is close to my router.

You might have a problem if the installer would have to drill a hole for the fibre cable more than 5 foot above ground level.

Should always check here first: https://www.broadbandchecker.btwholesale.com/#/ADSL/...

If it was saying FTTP is available, you can order it.

That only shows availability for providers using BT Wholesale, not using other or their own backhaul networks. It is quite possible for BT Wholesale to have Cablelink connections between their backhaul and the headend equipment serving customer premises installed before or after other providers. Availability may appear at different times (usually over the course of a few days) when using checkers on BT/EE/Plusnet (who use BT Wholesale) or Sky, TalkTalk and Zen who all have their own backhaul.

In reply to a post by knight01:

... may have to ask Zen if it's possible to run the fibre outdoors along the wall to first floor to my Fritzbox. I don't have a power socket near my front door.

As per Michael's post they typically won't like doing any through wall penetrations, working at height, so have some alternative cable routes / positions for the ONT in mind.

I think Zen use BT Wholesale for some exchanges. When FTTP arrived in our village it appeared on Zen's web site at about the same time as the OpenReach site was updated. When I ordered through Zen, BT Wholesale rejected the order because their database did not show FTTP as being available. We all went round in circles until I complained to Openreach - everyone continued to blame everyone else, but my order did then goo though.

Correct - Zen has network presence at many of the Openreach Handover Points, but not all of them. If Zen don't have network presence, they use BT Wholesale. The clue for BT Wholesale backhaul on FTTP is that the fastest speed available is 900; BT Wholesale doesn't support 1600, but Zen's own network does.

BT Wholesale will support 1600 very soon (probably in Q1/Q2 2027)

Have you got a reference for where you found that information? Or is it just a guess?

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Have you got a reference for where you found that information? Or is it just a guess?

My ISP told me

In reply to a post by adslmax:

BT Wholesale will support 1600 very soon (probably in Q1/Q2 2027)

That will be near enough 3 years since it became otherwise available.

Maybe they’ll offer XGS tiers by 2030….Hey ho, better late than never 😂

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Maybe they’ll offer XGS tiers by 2030….Hey ho, better late than never 😂

BTw won't do XGS tiers by 2030, it will be a long wait! EE isp are likely to sell it first.

Edited by adslmax (Sun 30-Aug-26 11:42:55)

In reply to a post by adslmax:

BTw won't do XGS tiers by 2030, it will be a long wait! EE isp are likely to sell it first.

That is merely your opinion, which is, perhaps, as unreliable as it has always been.

I really don't care about 1600 on GPON; even if it were available to me, I doubt I would have paid extra for it. It's fairly difficult to saturate a 900 (actually a bit faster) downstream, and 1600 offers no upstream speed boost over 900.

I care about greater upstream speeds. Unfortunately for me, Zen does not have network presence at my Openreach Handover Point, so my Zen connection is via BT Wholesale. The only possibility of non-Openreach FTTP in this area is Virgin Media's Project Mustang, which is not a wholesale network. I have a low-speed Virgin Media HFC connection as a backup on a dual-WAN router and as a prerequisite for Virgin's TV service, but I do not like Virgin Media as a company, especially their ridiculous price rises, so I might switch to Sky Stream and reduce Virgin to the cheapest broadband-only deal I can get from retentions.

All this means that I care about Openreach XGS-PON over BT Wholesale. This area was only FTTP-enabled earlier this year, so, bearing in mind that Openreach have been installing Combo-PON OLT cards for a while, it is possible that our PON is already XGS-PON capable. Perhaps the rollout of 100G Cablelinks (supposedly not entering trials until next May) and faster speeds will finally give an economic justification for Zen to extend its network to all the remaining unserved OHPs, including ours - only time will tell. Maybe BT Wholesale has a catch-up plan that will cover both 1600 GPON and XGS-PON in one big leap forward, but if not, we will remain limited to whatever BT Wholesale supports.

I also think we need to keep our expectations low for Openreach XGS-PON. Unlike most altnets, Openreach makes a fair amount of money from their Ethernet products. Some Ethernet customers may be tempted to drop their leased line in favour of symmetric contended XGS-PON if they can save a lot of money, even though they would be giving up their SLA and guaranteed contention ratio. I doubt that Openreach's wholesale pricing on symmetric or near-symmetric contended XGS-PON is likely to be anywhere near as low as the altnets.

To be honest, while I have a 2.5 Gbit/s wired LAN (with a few 10 Gbit/s ports) and channel-bonding-capable Wi-Fi 7 access points, 900 is the sweet spot right now for those who want a fast connection via Openreach FTTP, and I doubt I will upgrade to XGS-PON until I can do so at minimal additional expense. As I am on the Zen £39/month promotional pricing for Openreach 900/110 until my post-FTTP-upgrade minimum contract period expires in mid-2028, I would not be surprised if I stick with 900 at least until the end of the two years.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

BT Wholesale will support 1600 very soon (probably in Q1/Q2 2027)

1600 what, exactly ?

1600 quality streets, 1600 peanuts, 1600 grains of sains, or 1600 fibre cables ?

😅

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

In reply to a post by adslmax:

BT Wholesale will support 1600 very soon (probably in Q1/Q2 2027)

That will be near enough 3 years since it became otherwise available.

Maybe they’ll offer XGS tiers by 2030….Hey ho, better late than never 😂

and after much industy culling, the remaing 3 alt-nets go 50gbit pon with a 1:256 split 😂 all hail 2030 !!!!!!!!

In reply to a post by David_W2:

All this means that I care about Openreach XGS-PON over BT Wholesale. This area was only FTTP-enabled earlier this year, so, bearing in mind that Openreach have been installing Combo-PON OLT cards for a while, it is possible that our PON is already XGS-PON capable. Perhaps the rollout of 100G Cablelinks (supposedly not entering trials until next May)

the combo pon olts may have been installed for a few years now, we don't know, some or bods are saying its sparse. The facts on the ground may never be known. We know the current 10gb cablelinks are a bottleneck for xgs-pon.

In reply to a post by David_W2:

I also think we need to keep our expectations low for Openreach XGS-PON. Unlike most altnets, Openreach makes a fair amount of money from their Ethernet products. Some Ethernet customers may be tempted to drop their leased line in favour of symmetric contended XGS-PON if they can save a lot of money, even though they would be giving up their SLA and guaranteed contention ratio. I doubt that Openreach's wholesale pricing on symmetric or near-symmetric contended XGS-PON is likely to be anywhere near as low as the altnets.

They do make alot of money from the their ethernet products, mostly from the sla. Xmas day its broken - we will fix in in 2/4/8 hours (depending on sla)

The struggle for OR is that moving away from dedicated lines to pure sla addons will be a semi painful crossover but in my view needs to be done.

Very few companies need p2p full fibre and i suspect full new installs are very few.

In reply to a post by Michael_Chare:

My Openreach fibre cable runs round the side of my bungalow below the back door, goes through the soffit into the attic and ends at the ONT which is close to my router.

You might have a problem if the installer would have to drill a hole for the fibre cable more than 5 foot above ground level.

I may have to get something like this: https://shop.premitel.uk/product/fibre-termination-p...

My living room is on first floor and that's where I have the Fritzbox and available power sockets.

I am in a similar position to you, and in the unlikely event that 1600 Mb/s became available here via Zen I can't see any advantage for my purposes - I don't really need 900, and only have it to get the 100Mb/s upload which I do use.

I would happily trade 900/100 for 500/500, but we are in a fairly rural area and only got FTTP thanks to the voucher scheme. I doubt if we are a priority area for any other providers who might do a symmetric connection, so I'll just be grateful for what we have and hope that BT embraces symmetric connections one day.

In reply to a post by Taras:

the combo pon olts may have been installed for a few years now, we don't know, some or bods are saying its sparse. The facts on the ground may never be known. We know the current 10gb cablelinks are a bottleneck for xgs-pon.

Indeed; it is only a possibility that our recently installed PON is already on a Combo-PON card. The true extent of Openreach's XGS-PON preparedness in its network is commercially confidential.

In reply to a post by Taras:

They do make alot of money from the their ethernet products, mostly from the sla. Xmas day its broken - we will fix in in 2/4/8 hours (depending on sla)

The struggle for OR is that moving away from dedicated lines to pure sla addons will be a semi painful crossover but in my view needs to be done.

Very few companies need p2p full fibre and i suspect full new installs are very few.

Like you, I suspect Openreach will move to deploying Ethernet circuits wherever possible using dedicated bandwidth on its FTTP PON network at the contracted contention ratio with a suitable SLA. Having XGS-PON available will help this transition significantly. All Openreach promises are the circuit presentation at the Openreach NTE, together with the contention ratio and SLA, not that any particular technology is used on the Openreach side.

I also agree that future installs of dedicated duplex fibre will be low and limited to the highest-bandwidth or highest-SLA circuits (especially those mandating diverse routing).

“EAD 2.0” so called is promising major changes in customer NTE, so remains to be seen exactly what that will look like. There is already sharing of fibre infrastructure in parts of the network between Ethernet products and FTTP.

The publicly available information on EAD 2.0 is rather limited at present. Some who work for CPs and Openreach undoubtedly know more than I do.

EAD 2.0 seems largely an incremental set of changes: using spare fibres in fibre spines laid as part of the FTTP rollout to provide as much of a dedicated circuit as possible (i.e. going as far from the OHP towards the customer as you can by using spare capacity in an existing fibre spine to limit excess construction costs), and allowing multiple EAD 2.0 circuits to be presented on a single Cablelink to the CP at the OHP. The NTE situation is curious, as they seem to be moving to a passive optical demarcation at the customer end. Is it possible that Openreach will simply provide 10GBase-LR or 10GBase-ER at the customer end and leave the customer to provide their own optics in a suitable host?

It seems fairly clear that EAD 2.0 is currently a refresh of EAD and still uses dedicated fibre. However, once XGS-PON is available, it would be relatively simple for Openreach to offer EAD 2.0 over PON, especially for the lower bandwidth and non-diverse routed circuits: dedicate part of the PON bandwidth at the appropriate contention ratio to the EAD circuit, and present that circuit on a Cablelink in the same way as if it were EAD 2.0.

It will be interesting to see how things develop.

In reply to a post by David_W2:

EAD 2.0 seems largely an incremental set of changes: using spare fibres in fibre spines laid as part of the FTTP rollout to provide as much of a dedicated circuit as possible (i.e. going as far from the OHP towards the customer as you can by using spare capacity in an existing fibre spine to limit excess construction costs)

They’ve been doing that for a while - had an EAD installed rurally about 3.5 years ago and they used existing fibre installed for ‘FTTP’ (actually it was for our own FTTPoD from 2018/19) right up to the splitter node. So I guess FoD we paid for ended up helping with ECCs for EAD there..