Thinkbroadband Latest Full Fibre Report Now Live

If you didn’t know, a couple of times a year, thinkbroadband.com releases a document named “The State of Broadband” report, which provides some key metrics in the full fibre world. Specifically, they feed “RFS” data from all the major networks, so they can provide the most accurate report on how large an “alt net” footprint really is. Although, let’s be honest, some networks might bend the truth slightly to impress investors, but hey, they can’t be millions of miles off from the truth.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I want to point out that you should 100% go and read the document directly here, as the work TB put into this report is outstanding, and my “commentary” won’t do it justice.

Firstly, the reason this latest release is particularly exciting is due to a new table being added that shows overbuild. (Overbuild is when one network builds infrastructure “on top” of an existing network.) This isn’t a bad thing; it brings consumers more choice. Although some say this is a slight waste when, as a centralized goal, the nation is pushing for a full fibre Britain—why bother overbuilding? But let’s leave that debate for another day.

For me, the table is interesting as we haven’t really seen any overbuild statistics in the industry yet. (I say “yet” because after a small amount of snooping, I discovered a company called Infranomics had posted about having a huge amount of data on overbuilds, but I’m yet to see this in real-time or significant proof.)

Here are the quick stats:

Premises with 5 FTTP networks – 0% (around 4,000 premises)

Premises with 1 FTTP network – 69%

Premises with 2 FTTP networks – 22%

Premises with 3 FTTP networks – 2.8%

Premises with 4 FTTP networks – 0.2%

Another great piece of content from the report, breaks down the investors behind the larger networks. For me, its always interesting to see how many “backers”-“back” multiple networks (consolidation anyone?)

Next, the report shows which networks have received the most funding from Project Gigabit (the government scheme that pledged £5 billion to support new full fibre infrastructure). Now, this is really interesting, and I’ll tell you why. The statistics show a total of £1.6 billion invested. It also shows that the total number of properties passed with this funding equates to 902,800. So, some quick math tells us that the government is paying £2,104 per property passed! Now, that’s an average, but individually, it looks like this…