EE and BT UK Start Inviting Customers to Openreach XGS-PON Broadband Trial
ISPreview have spotted that mobile operator and broadband ISP EE (BT) has started sending out invites to those on their trials scheme who wish to help test Openreach’s new XGS-PON powered Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines, which for consumer services are capable of offering download speeds up to 8.5Gbps (850Mbps upload).
The news that EE plans to test the new network won’t come as much of a surprise because they confirmed as much back in December 2025 (here). Openreach has also previously informed ISPreview that their pilot would initially begin across an area of 40,000 premises in Guildford, although this seems likely to be expanded, and we’ve noted that the pilot may also catch some premises in neighbouring Woking.
Openreach currently plans to kick off the new XGS-PON broadband pilot from 23rd March 2026 (details). Anybody taking part will require another engineer visit to install one of the operator’s latest 10Gbps capable Optical Network Terminals (ONT) inside your home.
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According to EE’s new trial invite, customers who agree to take part will “receive a free broadband trial line for 3 months, plus an Amazon.co.uk voucher when you complete the trial” (EE says they’ll either install this as an upgrade to your existing line or as a temporary new line). Existing BT or EE broadband customers will also receive a credit towards their existing account for the duration of the trial.
At this stage, it’s unclear whether everybody who takes part will receive the top 8.5Gbps tier or one of their slower tiers, although EE did previously mention the 8.5Gbps top speed when first announcing their plans. EE is currently still the only ISP to confirm their participation, and it may take time for others to fully adapt to the new capacity requirements of such a service.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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This is just rubbing it in the nose of those of us who Openreach still haven’t connected to full-fibre.
Totally agree with you.
Openreach say they are working in our area! I havent seen anybody. What’s classified as ‘my area’.
Our whole area/ mid 1970s very large housing estate is completely an Openreach no fibre zone and no dates when that will change.
@sniff If it was built in the mid 1970s the chances are it was probably a DIG (direct in ground) site where the cables were just buried without ducting which makes it harder to replace. When Openreach did my town (Banbury) 5 years ago they missed off several estates which were like this but in the last month they have come back and started planting poles to upgrade these also. The chances are the will get to you eventually. I reckon they must be running out the low hanging fruit now & starting to come back to the harder (i.e. more expensive) installs.
@big Dave.I can understand OR being selective and you are correct re cabling.
VM have taken trouble and made the investment to dig up the miles of pavements to lay their fibre.
Luckily for us we managed to get on the Giff Gaff trial and pay £10 a month for 500Mbps for 12 months, I have no desire to join VM but happy with GG, an OR fibre alternative would be nice to have.
This is one of the problems, they seem more interested in higher speeds than getting more people onto decent broadband, and Openreach are not the only network that does this. Let’s get the majority of the country connected first and then bother about super high speeds.
I suppose it is cheaper than laying down new fibre.
Such a shame this country is so far behind others in so many ways.
‘Let’s get the majority of the country connected first and then bother about super high speeds.’
Availability of full fibre 82.6% and rising constantly. Availability of gigabit 90%.
‘Such a shame this country is so far behind others in so many ways.’
We actually aren’t at the global or European level but on the whole it’s difficult to move forward when so much of the population are fixated on the past.
Yep. I got a leaflet saying it was available in my area years ago, sadly it it is on every road around me except my close. And BT have zero plans to ever connect us to fibre.
I’m not totally sure, but I think its possible, particularly for large organisations, to do more than one thing at a time. So this trial doesn’t mean that they have stopped building the network.
I don’t have FTTP and it doesn’t bother me. Openreach can do two things at once. XGSPON elsewhere won’t change when I get FTTP, and if anything it might be good to wait as at some point OR will decide that new deployments will be XGSPON by default.
Like others have said, the UK has pretty good FTTP coverage figures these days, and that is overwhelmingly due to Openreach’s mass rollout which few other telcos have been able to achieve at that scale or speed.
Someone from the capabilities team really needs to understand em dashes and how that letter was obviously written by an LLM. Embarrassing.
I use em dashes when I write and I’m not an LLM (at least, I think so).
Em dashes are not concrete evidence of AI usage.
I wouldn’t get your hopes up.
I’ve had the 900 download from BT for over a year and in my experience it has all the same problems as my old fttc connection with the speed dropping massively after 7pm.
I can’t watch any streaming service even in standard definition in the evenings without constant buffering.
BT say there’s nothing wrong and this is normal on a shared line.
I got the invite yesterday, completed the questionnaire and sent it back, but I’m still on FTTC and closer to Camberley than Woking (but GU postcode).
Openreach have been working in our road and even posted notes to say when they would be installing Full Fibre in each section, but they haven’t done any of my part of the small estate I live on and the dates have passed.
They are still just round the corner, but all of the survey markings done in advance have washed away in the rain. I now have this horrible feeling, after all these years, we are going to get left out while every road around us gets it…
Would love to participate – full 10Gbps fibre network running through the house with devices connected at 10Gbps.
Pity then I’m not in the trial area!
Never mind. This is progress nonetheless.
Question is who will be able to afford it? 8.5Gbps on OR is not going ot be a Alt Net £99 deal.
They will probably make it multi hundreds and out of reach of most consumers otherwise their leased line business will go pop. Or will it?
They’re using Ordinance Survey data to ensure businesses can’t use products intended for residential customers. Nearly every DIA is a gigabit or under so any symmetrical products will cannibalise some of that revenue.
Not symmetrical on XGS-PON? Weird
Openreach do in fact support symmetric speeds up to 8.5Gbps, but until the final product we can’t be 100% sure how many of their ‘consumer’ tiers will offer it. No doubt business tiers will have access to all of the speeds.
https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/content/dam/cpportal/public/images-and-documents/home/help-and-support/sins/documents/STIN_1007v1p2.pdf
Still trying to think of a use case for 8.5Gbps in the home. Unless you’re installing an AWS Outpost under your stairs, it seems like absurd overkill. Oh, and you’ll need to install some very expensive 10Gbps home networking kit as well. But sure, great for bragging rights.
There isn’t one for 50PON either, but there is someone out there with it at their home.
Just because there’s no “use case” should never, ever, stop innovation. Else, I’ll go find my old 56K modem in the attic and plug that in, oh wait, it’s no good, I don’t even have a phone line to plug it into! Wonder how that happened?
10gbit networking is no longer “very expensive”.
25gbit is expensive because of the switches being expensive, and there no consumer 25gbit routers around.
40 gbit/50 gbit you are starting need quite alot of pcie lanes and thats the start of it
I can, today, buy a new 10GBASE-T Ethernet NIC for under £60 delivered to my home. Suitable cabling is £1/m pre-made. And new unmanaged 10GBASE-T switches are about £15/port.
That’s not “very expensive” – it’s about the same price gigabit was 20 years ago, when I started to move from 100M to gigabit.
Fibre optic ethernet is still expensive (whether gigabit or faster), but you don’t need fibre until you’re looking at more than 100m in a single cable run, speeds above 10G, or shaving microseconds off latencies (which can get eaten by distance, anyway – in optical fibre or twisted pair copper, your signal travels at about 200 metres per microsecond, and even in vacuum, you get a bit under 300 metres per microsecond, maximum).
Fortunately you’re with an ISP whose new equipment installed last year cannot provide that speed so you won’t be tempted by it.
Use cases marginal but if the capacity is there why not sell it?
Trash company EE/BT. Standards have reached rock bottom since EE merger with BT. 25 years with Wannado, Fasrnet, Orange and finally EE. Was satisfied with the service and customer response when required. But definitely the worst internet quality since moving to full fibre. Old copper system was more stable and consistent. I called them over 20 times in a 1 month period over a year ago regarding crap quality of broadband and no account details for two internet accounts. As of today nothing has been resolved. No complaints dept or procedure. I’ll be leaving Oct this year when contracts are up.
BT/EE best ISP ive been with. Constant 900+ meg speed. Never had a days issue for the last 5+ years apart from when workmen dup my cables up by accident. Very satisfied with customer service. Easily best decision to get BT/EE full fibre. They have a customer service telephone number and a complaints procedure. Will be staying with EE and will hopefully upgrade to symmetric when offered.
Been with EE sinde I had FTTP installed 4 years ago, absolutely no issues with the connection from EE’s perspective.
Had one outage recently but this was due to an engineer accidently breaking my fibre when installing a neighbours connection. Also had a village wide outage for 24 hours a couple of years ago. Apart from these issues that were not EE’s fault, there’s been no problems.
I’ve moved up from 100, to 300, and now to 900Mbps, and the speeds are always at the top end with latency consistently around 4-6ms.
I don’t know about BT/EE, I left BT years ago because of their customer service, that is in the ADSL days. I was with Plusnet for 9 years FTTC, which belongs to BT and no doubt use the same system and for the most part it was fine. The only major problem I had was with the Openreach end.
I do think the BT routers are bloated and no doubt the EE ones are the same.
I would not go back to Plusnet now, and I certainly would not go to EE/BT.
How do you mean ‘bloated’?
What features are unnecessary? How big should the firmware be in your opinion?
As above, I’m always intrigued by these kinds of statements. Against what benchmark is it bloated? What does “bloated” even objectively mean? What expertise does the claimant have to make that kind of assertion? How is the “bloated” router impacting end users to the extent that its a concern?
@K: Good to hear you are getting good results from your 900Mbps Fibre connection. You’re correct in saying BT/EE have a complaints procedure, and as a plus the contact call centres are UK and Ireland based. One downside i found was if you have a case opened, they want to close it down at the earliest opportunity, whether the problem has been sorted to the customers satisfaction or not.
That invitation can be read to someone oblivious that EE/BT have invented XGS-PON which clearly isn’t the case.
Er…. as it happens – they did – back in the 1980s
https://www.comsoc.org/node/19811
I would be happy just to have fibre at all. Still stuck on fttc despite the houses 3 doors down having full fibre.
why is it always BT and EE i thought plusnet was part of them as well or have they tried to push plusnet to the side
Because Plusnet is their budget “no frills” brand
Hi Mark,
This still pushes the power problem somewhere. Currently PSTN provides 24-36 backup power to the CPE.
The green boxes these may go into, might be valved lead acid batteries for UPS, which if and when they become 5 years old, will have a backup capacity of 2-4 hours according to my research.
With rolling black outs from 2028 we’ll have to hope someone is doing some better planning somewhere…
YouTube search “kathryn porter energy” to get a scope of the problem.
Cheers Mark
not sure of the context that this was replying to, but assuming it has something to do with Openreach FTTP – this is not accurate.
Openreach does not install the FTTP exchange equipment in green cabinets in 99.9999% of cases – some ultra remote areas will be the exception. When it is in an exchange it uses the same highly resilient power sources as the PSTN equipment, and so as long as you can keep your end up, you’ll be online.
Worth checking Ms Porter’s past record on cherry picking data to try and undermine climate science in order to play down anthropomorphic climate change and support fossil fuels. She is not an impartial expert presenting impartial science, she has an obvious agenda and cites sources that support it including the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Contrary to her apparent opinions the National Grid does have some vague idea what it’s doing and assesses supply months in advance. It’s highly unlikely to sacrifice our energy supplies at the altar of climate change.
Ignoring everything else no electricity no business activity, no business activity nothing to tax. Not in anyone’s interests to have power issues.
Unsure if you’ve done your research on this as well but: ‘Currently PSTN provides 24-36 backup power to the CPE.’
No, the PSTN protects telephony involving a corded phone only. Apart from corded phones all CPE for voice and everything for Internet relies on power from the home whether from battery or mains.
The hardware in the exchange powering this full fibre service has the same resilient power as the PSTN. Often better actually as this kit is in bigger exchanges with battery backup and generators.
Whilst it is correct that the number of properties serviced by openreach remote OLTs is tiny, it is factually incorrect to state that they are confined to ultra remote areas. Many premises in very urban areas are serviced by Openreach remote OLTs , aka SHE (subtended headends) due to the significant cost savings and speed of deployment they provide.
> “With rolling black outs from 2028”
:rolls eyes:
@Mark
Do we know what router they plan to use for this trial?