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BT puts superfast broadband within reach of 24m premises

Superfast broadband services delivered via BT’s Openreach network are now available to over 24 million UK premises – but only 5.5 million punters are currently biting. 

The latest quarterly figures from BT detail the current size and scope of its superfast footprint, which now accounts for over 80 per cent of the Openreach network, which covers roughly 29 million British addresses. 

Related: BT mulls G.fast and gigabit fibre for 10 million by 2021Over the last three months, Openreach engineers made superfast services available to half a million new premises. Superfast broadband from Openreach uses FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) technology which currently delivers a maximum download speed of 80Mbps; although as with ADSL services, top speeds vary depending on your location. 

In that time 494,000 new customers signed up for superfast services from a variety of ISPs, a year on year increase of 32 per cent. BT says that the lion’s share of these new customers – 250,000 – took services from BT Broadband.

The remaining 244,000 took superfast services from other ISPs including Sky, TalkTalk and Plusnet, which is interesting considering Plusnet is owned by BT Group. BT doesn’t break down this figure and further, making it hard to tell just how popular superfast services are with other customers. 

BT’s also not saying how many of these ‘new’ superfast customers are upgrading from ADSL to FTTC, although it says that nearly half of its 8 million plus customers (3.7 million, nearly 47 per cent) have now signed up for BT Infinity. 

If you’re among the 5 million or so who can’t get superfast broadband from BT, you might like to know that BT’s recently-updated postcode checker will now give you a better (but not exact) idea of when you’ll be able to sign up for a faster service. 

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