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The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband<\/a> for July 2026 has today helped us to produce an updated H1 assessment of how big \u2013 in terms of network coverage (premises passed) \u2013 the top seventeen largest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP<\/a>) based UK broadband ISP networks have become. We also compare this data against official coverage claims.<\/p>\n One of the difficulties with keeping close tabs on the rapid growth of UK full fibre networks is that some operators often make coverage claims that are difficult to independently verify. Similarly, we\u2019ve often found that the official \u201cpremises passed\u201d figures put out by some of those providers may not always reflect reality.<\/p>\n NOTE: As of today around 85.22% of UK premises can access a full fibre network, rising to nearly 91.07% for gigabit-capable broadband \u2013 the latter combines FTTP<\/a>\/B and Hybrid Fibre Coax (cable).<\/p>\n For example, in some cases official figures can include partially built areas that aren\u2019t fully live yet and, in other cases, the network may be technically built, but customers in some of the covered areas won\u2019t be able to get it ordered or installed by an ISP (i.e. not yet truly \u201cReady for Service\u201d \u2013 RFS). Similarly, in a smaller number of cases, operators can sometimes make mistakes in their data.<\/p>\n The latest State of Broadband Report (July 2026)<\/a> from TBB is thus quite useful because we get an up-to-date summary of how much coverage has been independently verified to exist (RFS) across the largest alternative network (altnet) operators in the full fibre space. This can then be compared with the official coverage claims from each operator to better assess real-world progress.<\/p>\n Naturally, there are some caveats to consider when doing this. Firstly, TBB is not perfect, and they do sometimes miss bits and pieces of network coverage (please email them if you spot this). Secondly, conducting independent analysis of network builds is slow and laborious work, thus over the years we\u2019ve tended to perceive that TBB\u2019s latest data can be up to around 1-3 months behind actual build.<\/p>\n Such a time lag, which will vary between operators, may not seem like much, but it can create gaps between independent and official figures. The size of which will partly depend upon each operator\u2019s current pace of build. In addition, we\u2019ve also dated the official claims below as most operators only very occasionally provide updates on their build progress, which will thus be out of step with TBB\u2019s latest modelling. Suffice to say, gaps in the figures below aren\u2019t always because an altnet may be overstating their progress<\/p>\n Finally, we\u2019ve included TBB\u2019s previous figures from September 2025<\/a> below, which helps to show whether a network operator has slowed its pace of build or even stalled.<\/p>\n Top 17 Largest UK Full Fibre Networks by Coverage \u2013 H1 2026<\/p>\n Operator Openreach<\/a> (BT<\/a>) CityFibre<\/a> Netomnia<\/a> (YouFibre<\/a>) Nexfibre<\/a> (Virgin Media<\/a>) Virgin Media<\/a> (RFOG) CommunityFibre<\/a> Hyperoptic<\/a> Gigaclear<\/a> FullFibre Limited<\/a> + Zzoomm<\/a> Fibrus<\/a> Trooli<\/a> FreedomFibre + Truespeed<\/a> Grain Connect<\/a> AllPoints Fibre Networks<\/a> F&W Networks<\/a> KCOM<\/a> Toob<\/a> As usual, we aren\u2019t going to micro analyse each operator above and, in any case, most of TBB\u2019s real-world focused estimates of Ready for Service (RFS) coverage are roughly where we\u2019d expect them to be when compared with official claims. But there are a few caveats to point out for certain operators.<\/p>\n Firstly, Virgin Media<\/a>\u2019s network is currently in the middle of a major upgrade, which is seeing XGS-PON based FTTP<\/a> being deployed into areas that could previously only access their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network. Currently, it\u2019s a little bit difficult to accurately track these XGS areas, and thus TBB has only included the figure for their older Radio Frequency Over Glass (RFOG) based FTTP build.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the nexfibre<\/a> build is technically a separate company and so gets its own entry, despite only selling packages via Virgin Media and giffgaff<\/a>. Officially, Virgin Media and nexfibre<\/a> claim to have passed a total of over 9 million premises with FTTP (the missing gap above thus reflects Virgin Media\u2019s HFC to XGS upgrades).<\/p>\n Otherwise, G.Network<\/a> has dropped out of the table this time due to having a smaller RFS network than toob<\/a>, which by comparison has continued to grow their own on-net FTTP coverage during the period. Some other altnets have also seen a modest coverage increase \u2013 proportionally \u2013 since last year\u2019s update, such as Grain Connect<\/a>, Fibrus<\/a>, Gigaclear<\/a>, nexfibre, Netomnia<\/a> and Openreach<\/a>. The pace of progress at others has either been very slow or stalled.<\/p>\n As usual Hyperoptic<\/a>\u2019s official coverage data continues to show some extremely wide gaps from TBB\u2019s real-world analysis, and it\u2019s a similar story for F&W Networks, albeit with the latter not having given us a clear coverage update since 2024 \u2013 making it harder to judge. APFN has also long shown a similar issue.<\/p>\n Finally, the table also sees the addition of Truespeed<\/a> and Freedom Fibre<\/a> (i.e. the FreedomTruespeed Group) for the first time, which have now merged and were previously too small to include. But they do show quite a fair gap to the TBB figures, which we suspect might be because their official figures weren\u2019t fully RFS. Other altnets currently remain too small to be included.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband for July 2026 has today helped us to produce an updated H1…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[13681,12534,5,6],"class_list":["post-95395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-fttp","tag-statistics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117021168714010322","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nPremises July 2026 (Sept 2025) \u2013 TBB Analysis
\nOfficial Claim<\/p>\n
\n22.4 million (19.2m)
\n23.5m \u2013 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
\n4.4m (4.3m)
\n4.5m RFS \u2013 Jan 2026<\/p>\n
\n3.2m (2.6m)
\n3m RFS \u2013 Jan 2026<\/p>\n
\n2.5m (1.8m)
\n2.6m \u2013 Feb 2026<\/p>\n
\n1.7m (1.7m)
\nIt\u2019s complicated (see below)<\/p>\n
\n1.5m (1.5m)
\n1.5m \u2013 May 2026<\/p>\n
\n1.4m (1.3m)
\n2m \u2013 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
\n642,000 (624,200)
\n618,000 RFS \u2013 Dec 2025<\/p>\n
\n604,000 (602,000)
\n600,000 RFS \u2013 Jan 2025<\/p>\n
\n455,000 (426,000)
\n465,000 \u2013 May 2026<\/p>\n
\n448,000 (444,000)
\n477,000 \u2013 Apr 2026<\/p>\n
\n355,000 (new entry)
\n430,000 \u2013 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
\n316,000 (244,400)
\n300,000 \u2013 Jul 2026<\/p>\n
\n300,000 (299,400)
\n500,000 \u2013 Feb 2026<\/p>\n
\n296,000 (294,100)
\n410,000 RFS \u2013 Feb 2024<\/p>\n
\n290,000 (287,800)
\n307,000 \u2013 Apr 2026<\/p>\n
\n288,000 (256,500)
\n280,000 \u2013 Dec 2024<\/p>\n