BT superfast broadband coverage passes 25 million premises

The firm estimates over 4,700 telephone exchanges have been upgraded since 2009

BT today revealed that 25 million premises in the UK can now access its superfast broadband services, adding that it Openreach division is now connecting more than 70,000 premises a week.

It said its fibre push has also driven up average speeds in the UK to 29Mbps in 2015.

The 25 million figure represents an increase of nearly nine per cent on the 23 million premises BT had connected by July 2015.

BT said around four million of the connections involved funding from Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), with the remaining 21 million covered by BT's own commercial project.

BT said it is on track to achieve the BDUK target of supplying superfast broadband coverage to 95 per cent of the population by December 2017.

Newly-installed BT Openreach CEO Clive Selley said that reaching 25 million premises was testament to the work BT's engineers have done across the UK.

"The UK is making great progress with fibre broadband. Availability and take-up are well ahead of most European countries and I'd like to thank the thousands of Openreach engineers who have worked so tirelessly to make this happen," he said.

The firm estimates over 4,700 telephone exchanges have been upgraded since 2009 and tens of thousands of street cabinets have been installed or overhauled to handle fibre connections.

BT also touted its ongoing work to find new ways to boost the speed of its copper connections, notably G.fast. which could bring speeds of around 300Mbps to homes and businesses on the network.

Despite the work by BT many remain critical of the rollout, particularly projects involving the BDUK funds, claiming the speeds being provided are not "superfast" and do not future proof the UK for the ever-increasing amount of data being consumed over broadband networks.

Furthermore, rivals such as CityFibre are starting to pose a challenge to BT Openreach in the wholesale fibre broadband market with pure fibre to the premises offerings that can hit speeds of 1Gbps, both upload and download.

BT also faces pressures to improve its performance when it comes to providing business broadband connections, after Ofcom said its current installation timeframes are too slow.