BT Wholesale Set to Launch 1.8Gbps UK FTTP Broadband Later in 2026
Nearly two years have now passed since Openreach launched their current fastest consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband tiers – 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps – into the UK market (here) and yet BT’s own wholesale division still has yet to offer the same speeds to ISPs. But ISPreview understand that this may change later in 2026.
The lack of action from BT Wholesale is not something that most consumers may have noticed, since several ISPs have still been able to launch the tiers by harnessing networks from other wholesale suppliers, or even by building their own platforms independent of BTW (EE, Zen Internet etc.).
Nevertheless, there are still some providers that have opted to wait for BTW to play their slow game of industry catch-up, which in practice often left them stuck offering top speeds of no more than 1Gbps (frequently displayed as c.900Mbps due to the usual advertising rules – average speeds as at peak time).
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Quite why it’s taking BTW so long to adapt to the “new” Openreach tiers remains unclear, although the launch of faster packages always involves some additional costs and complexity due to the need to adapt to greater capacity demands and update order systems etc. But BTW itself gives a rather different reason for the delay, which seems to suggest that they’ve lacked the resources to focus on it.
A Spokesperson for BTWholesale told ISPreview:
“Ahead of the PSTN network being retired in January 2027, BT Wholesale’s focus has been supporting partners and their customers through the UK’s transition to All-IP. We’ve invested significantly in platforms, tools and services to help communications providers move from copper networks to full fibre and digital voice.
We have been supporting the transition at scale, while continuing to evolve our full fibre portfolio in line with growing demand for higher speeds and performance. We are currently developing additional FTTP tiers to give even greater choice and flexibility.
BT Wholesale offers one of the broadest access portfolios in the market, enabling partners to deliver reliable, high-quality connectivity using the technology mix that best suits their needs.”
Sadly, BTW doesn’t say precisely when the new FTTP tiers will go live, but several of ISPreview’s industry sources have indicated that they expect to see them later in 2026. Meanwhile, Openreach are already in the process of piloting a new range of FTTP (XGS-PON) speeds up to 8.5Gbps (here), and we can only hope that BTW won’t take another 2-3 years to adapt to that too.
In the meantime, BTW is being left behind by other wholesale providers, many of which can also work with alternative networks and offer a better range of products to ISPs and thus consumers.
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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Don’t know how they compare on price but Zen’s Fibre Hub looks a far better bet if you’re a small ISP, the highest Openreach speeds plus access to multiple altnets as well.
I don’t think BTw are too worried about competitiveness. Most of their major broadband customers have moved to building their own networks and/or partnering with others anyway. The decision to have EE’s 1.8G customers take a new direct provisioning path (yet using the same Nokia routers, cablelinks, etc as BTw) perhaps sets the tone for the future.
I can certainly believe the claim that their time was better spent on PSTN migration.
Does this mean Plusnet will start to offer the higher speeds?
Doubt it. Plusnet is sold as a budget no-frills brand and if you want faster than 900 they will point in the direction of EE.
I was surprised Plusnet provides 900, being a budget brand I thought they may have maxed out at say 500 or lower and then got people to change to EE/BT for higher speeds.
BT group need to have a budget 900 package to stay competitive. Sky, Vodafone etc are doing 900 for around £30/month on Openreach so Plusnet is their budget offering at the same price point.
We are on about BT wholesale here, so it it could still take a long time after to get to consumers. This is only mainly for smaller providers, large providers like Sky Vodafone don’t use BTwholesale as far as i know.
When it comes to BT/EE, I bet it will be expensive, because BT is more expensive than most other providers.
I think on IsPs like AA and Zen it will certainly be out of a lot of peoples reach, but then people who use these providers do so for their own reasons.
I think AAs 1.8 tier will tip over £100 a month.
EE have been selling it using BT Wholesale since 2023. They’ve no reason to change how they provide it they cover everywhere. BT don’t sell it for purely commercial reasons. Zen have their own network and price the same whether on their own network or BT Wholesale. No reason it can’t reach consumers the moment they launch it.
BT/EE retail pricing is in line with other profitable companies. They will never compete with altnets who are still burning through debt to attempt to build marketshare.
They may even be lower – at my address Vodafone and Zen are more expensive than EE and that’s despite them showing the cityfibre options (mentions symmetric speeds)
@Polish poler – EE 1.6 does not use BT wholesale
@polish poler
EE 1.6 has never used Wholesale
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2025/08/ee-uk-set-to-cut-bt-wholesale-out-from-slower-broadband-packages.html
John: EE’s 1.6 terminates on the same BT Wholesale routers as the other BT / EE tiers.
It presumably gets there over the same cablelinks, but not totally sure. It definitely then goes over the same BT Wholesale network on its way to the Internet.
It’s apparently provisioned differently. It still uses BT Wholesale equipment in the same way as the other products.
@Ivor, you are right that they are in line with others, I had a peak just to be nosey. Things must have changed because it was not that long ago that BT was far more expensive than others for the same service. I suppose people had to support the TV and sport side of BT even if they did not want them, just like people using Sky does.
I don’t disagree with you about Alnets having debt, it costs a lot of money to build networks and until they can get enough customers make enough money to make profit and pay the debt off they are always going to have that problem, sadly. Hopefully with some of them combining it will help, not how I wanted things, but what can you do? I still prefer to use an Alt net than Openreach.
Don’t forget BT/openreach have been going for years and you know you deny it, but BT got the network for pittance from the government who sold it for far too little. I*(n all those years charging sky-high prices for phone calls and line rental they have made more than enough to update the network.
you say about debt, but BT Group last year had £18.8 billion debt.
Altnets are a good thing as it gives competition, I know you will not be happy ass your shares will go lower, but we have needed this for a long time in the UK, which for a long time was Openreach or Virgin.
I still have doubts that Openreach would have put FTTP here when they did if Zzoomm had not come here.
We will see how things go, I will stay with who I am with unless something happens that I can’t stay, got no interest in going back the openreach network unless I really have to.
I know it’s controversial on here to suggest that most Broadband users, probably in the high 90’s %, don’t need anything near 900Mb/s and especially 1.8Gb/s. Most households would probably manage with 100-150Mb/s and may decide on a price/speed compromise around 300Mb/s. Most of the posters on here are more engaged than the average household/customers, with the majority of customers likely to target price over raw speed.
I agree, the biggest use of data for most customers is video streaming and with 4K streams at around 30 megabits 100-150 is probably more than adequate for most users right now, the stability & improved latency of FTTP are probably the bigger factors for customers. No doubt we will require faster speeds in the future but I bet than 900 megabits will be more than adequate for the vast majority of customers for at least the next 10 years.
I don’t think it’s that controversial – I think it’s a fact.
I have 1.8Gbps because: –
1. I can
2. When I download I don’t want to be waiting.
I’ve run the math, and even for larger downloads, once you get above 500Mbps there really is diminishing returns.
But, whatever, I’ll run my 1.8 and be very happy.
Maths*
You’re welcome
OK, I guess? If all you can fault is my grammar then, great.
IMO its not about the abg bandwidth usage of a household, but the burstable speed wanted/desired.
A comppletely over simplified comparison is the speed of cars. Most people in their day to day lives only use their cars on the school run, computing to and from work, running errands, etc, etc. they are not doing long distance driving every day (I’m sure there are people who do, ignoring professional drivers, but again we taking about the average), they are sticking “close” to home, about an avg of ~20 miles per day. But cars have larger petrol tanks than whats “needed”. With a 40-60L tank, you can go, what, 400-500 miles on a tank, 20 days on a single fill up?
And Car speed. Most people are not doing those 20miles at motorway speeds, they are nipping around town, or if they are on the motorway, prob stuck in rush hour traffic. So why is it that pretty much every single car on the market today can easily top 80mph? Because people want the choice and flexablity to go on a road trip at the weekend, work remote and compute into head office once/twice a month, just in general have the ability to break of of their nrommal usage pattern, even though for the vast majority of time the car will never do those tasks (and this is even before getting into “Why do people buy sporty cars?” not even talking about flash high end cars think Ferrari end of scale, but things like the VW Golf R).
The main thing “normies” currently notice the true redline speed of their connection is Video Games. New CoD or FIFA drops and people want to play that game asap.
New CoD drops and if you just want to play Warzone on its own, without the other Modern Warfare modes, that download clocks in to around 80GB on PS5, which on a 300mb/s connection, which nothing else running on the conenction that the time will take ~40 mins. Got a couple kids int he house, Now thats 1hr 20mins.
Red Dead 2: about an hour per console. CoD with all its modes (220 GB): 1.5–2+ hours
I have a family member who has 3 teenage sons and until recently (one of them went to Uni and discovered girls, so his priorities changed) and even on a 500mbps connection there would be fights abouit the internet speed.
Though granted, in that case, a third of the bandwidth use has moved to Manchester, And the examples I gave are on the more extreme end of the spectrum. and this is a rather bursty inrush of data (main spikes will only be a few times a year (releases dates of major titles, Christmas, birthdays, etc) But add on top that more and more kids these days are howswapping their installed games because they are so large and buying l;arger drives is getting more and more expensive.
But its not just Kids, I know many people in their 30s/40s that grew up with gaming and so carryied that pasttime into their adult lives, and when they get home from work they don’t want to dick about wait for a game to update/download.
IMO, its not a matter of most people “needing” the speed, its more about people not having to watch a progress bar slowly go across the screen when they do something outside of their normal usage patternm that a fatter pipe will solve. And with Gigabit now hovering around that £30 price point, seems like a no brainer.
Why is the speed other people are getting something that bothers you?
@Bruce, yes I know what you mean – it is something that is growing very irritating to me lately. Why do other people care what speed I pay for? Nobody’s business except mine and my ISP..
@Cognizant,
I agree with you. I downloaded COD earlier and it was 606GB just for the main files. No problems at 7.6Gbps – was done in a few minutes.
People like us keep it cheap for people like them end of the day – so why do they complain?
Wait, what? 606GB? Good grief!
@Cognizant, It don’t bother me, I do wonder what people do which the speed, but at the end it is up to you. I could go up to 2300Mb/s, but I don’t see the point. I would drop for 500Mb/s if the price was a lot lower.
Some people are bothered where they see network, mucking around with these higher speeds, and they can’t even get FTTP, that is where they get annoyed. Is it not a good idea to cover the UK in FTTP first and then worry about higher speeds?
It is all about money, with some gullible people thinking they need this speed and will pay higher prices for it.
I was told it costs no more to supply someone with 80Mb/s than with 1Gb/s, some network, some equipment, same energy used. The coast is the data, they charge more because people with higher speeds may use more data. So these people who have these higher speeds and paying more, but don’t really use a lot of data are subsidising those that do use a lot of data, what ever speed they use.
Would I go to 1Gb/s if I had lots of money? Yes.
I could do it now, but I don’t see the point for what I do. It is only £11 a month more than what I pay now, but I prefer to use that £11 a month for something else.
As I said, if I had thousands in the bank, then I would not care and would do it.
I get more than what I pay for anyway, suppose to get 500Mb/s, but get more than that.
as i said, not bothered what people pay for, just curious.
@Cognizant Yeah, it all depends on which parts of Call of duty you want as they have pretty much bundled it up into a single title on steam. (the “base game” is basically just a launcher, and all the parts of the game are treated as DLC so you can cherry pick whihc parts of the game you want to download)
Call of Duty Black Ops 6 campaign on its own is a 40.85GiB download, plus a langauge pack which is about another gig, BO6 multiplayer is 86.37 GiB (+language pack)
Black ops 7 campaign is 110.95 Gib (+language pack) BO7 Multiplayer is 123.19 GiB, Call of Duty®: Black Ops 7 – Zombies is 104GiB – Warzone is 130GiB
There is a lot of reuse between indivuial “packs” because the game can not rely on you having the assests from the camplain installed if they are reused in the multiplayer for example. And CoD does like to use the latest and greatest tech for the monster GPUs in PC gaming which only a handful of PC gamers actually have.
But CoD is kinda on the more extreme side of things.
https://steamdb.info/app/1938090/depots/ <-
(Blahh I wish we could edit comments :-P)
@Cognizant which is why I used the PS5 for my examples, its going to be the more common platform these games are played on and consoles are a fixed target so can be better optimised for (For example, no need to worry about how much VRAM a player is going to have (its either the base model or the pro model) where on PC you have to target for the more budget end systems, the higher than high end systems, and everything inbetween.
So I was trying to be fair and use numbers that would be more common among the player base.
Apart from the fact its GPON.
It’ll be interesting to see how much this gets mis-sold. The number of times I’ve seen 1Gb as being ‘advised’ for work from home, gaming or busy households is ridiculous. I even had a virginmedia helpful suggestion that, beacuse I used Spotify, 1Gb might improve my experience. The vast majority of people have not even the faintest clue they are regularly using less than 100Mb per person.
There is some truth to faster = better for larger households, to reduce bufferbloat. The problem is this is mostly down to the upload speed not downstream, so is barely helped on Openreach. We’d all have a lot less problems if speeds were symmetrical across the board.
Oh yes, agree 100%.
One thing I can say about my network, they have not bothered to get in touch to try to get me to go faster.
@Alexander.
I get A+ on mine – And no bloat at all. Not sure if that is to do with the high speed or not – but it does help.
The 1.2/1.8 tiers are just there to squeeze a little bit of extra revenue out of the GPON service. I can’t imagine to much effort being put into it, or high takeup.
I bet they will updated via BTw checker 1800/220 by end of 2026 or early 2027. Only EE isp will get 8.5Gbps from Openreach while the rest of all ISPs have to wait until at least 2029/30.
If BTW wait till 2029/30 They will be closed by 2028 when the altnets take over.
For symmetrical fttp will never happen on BTw for end customers for many years! (probably not until at least after 2035)
BT Wholesale compete with CityFibre and other altnets. Openreach have plans to reduce the business moving from leased lines to XGSPON. Wholesale will offer symmetrical quickly, doesn’t really cost them to sell the higher upload.
Why would they do that ??
exactly why would the put software onto an olt switch to restrict its data rate which is an extra cost???
Why do you think ISps are now offering 1 gig for about the same price as 500 meg???
To be fair 1.8gbit speeds are not that relevant, the highlight is gigabit full fibre, which BTw are able to supply, and still many customers dont even take those speeds.
Some people will go for it, certainly if a ISP says, for an extra tenner a month you can increase your speed to such a such. Some people will go for it because, faster is better. That is what they have been led to believe.
Most people would not even notice 1.8Gb/s as most peoples network would not cope with it, since the majority these days use Wi-Fi and we all know how reliable Wi-Fi is.
Even 1Gb a lot of people would not notice any difference from lower speeds.
Streaming don’t need it, you would need a lot of people streaming 4K to overrun 1Gb, certainly more than would be in most household. Gamers would only notice the difference in downloading games. I know a few gamers that use different platforms a couople of them are still using FTTC, but it makes no difference to their gaming.
Downloadign and uploiading files, unless they are massive, again, not going to notice much difference.
I upload documents to my partners NAS, also some videos and she does the same here way to mine and most are super quick even with her 400Mb/s, that she dropped to last year.
I am sad to see BTW falling behind. They would have to go some to make me come off this for £99 a month
https://ibb.co/5Wysd7Xj