Openreach has announced the pricing and commercial terms for its new symmetric 1Gbps broadband FTTP speed tier service, due to launch on 1 April.
The new service will be available at premises, including both homes and businesses, where FTTP has been built under its £800 million partnership with government’s Project Gigabit programme. The programme is currently expected to provide more than 300,000 of the UK’s hardest-to-reach premises with access to gigabit-capable broadband.
The new symmetric speed full fibre service will be offered at a £100pcm wholesale rental charge.
The new service will offer communication providers (CPs) further choice for their end customers when ordering a service over Openreach’s full fibre network at these locations.
A symmetrical service can accelerate the upload of large files, such as videos, graphics and software. This can be helpful for content creators, reducing latency and ping times, or boosting cloud-based applications and services, allowing end customers to quickly upload and access data.
Openreach product manager, Matthew Sledge, said, “We’ve already successfully launched to CPs new download speeds of up to 1.8Gbps over our Full Fibre network and we’re keen to continue pushing the capabilities of the network so we can further diversify our portfolio and offer our CP customers, and their own end customers a broader choice of fibre based products.
“With broadband data usage growing year on year, we’re also planning for the future, and have recently announced our intention to trial FTTP over XGS-PON in 2026.”
Any end customers signing up to the new 1Gbps symmetric service will be able to use their existing optical network terminal - the box that allows the fibre optic cable to be connected from inside a home, out through the property and to the fibre network in the street.