Openreach Limited is Scotland’s national digital network business.
We work in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, government and businesses – large and small – to the world.
We build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure everyone can be connected. Our broadband network is the UK’s biggest, passing more than 31.8m premises, and 95 per cent of Scotland can get a superfast broadband service.
More than 665 communications providers – like BT, SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and Zen – use our network to provide services to their customers. This brings an array of competition to the market.
Today, we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof, Full Fibre broadband network. We aim to bring this ultra-reliable, gigabit-capable technology to 25 million UK premises by December 2026, and our £15bn investment plans include 350 Scottish cities, towns and villages.
The new network now reaches 7.2 million UK homes and businesses – 600,000 in Scotland, and one in four households and businesses have already upgraded – check if you can join them!
It took eight years for us to pass our first million premises but only four months to pass our latest million. Our engineers are building like fury, reaching 58,000 properties a week.
We’re committed to a balanced build across rural and urban Scotland, investing in more than 200 hard-to-reach, rural communities. We’re also working with government, to upgrade 110,000 of the nation’s most remote households and businesses through the Reaching 100% programme.
What we do matters. Research shows a nationwide Full Fibre network could potentially provide a £4.5bn boost to Scottish productivity and bring 37,000 people back into the workforce.
To help build the new fibre network and deliver great service, we’ve taken on 900 new apprentices in Scotland since 2018/19, and will hire another 500 engineers and trainees in 2022, with our workforce at a record 3,700. Around 17 per cent of last year’s recruits were women, and we want to do even better.
We’ve invested £500,000 in brilliant Scottish training facilities for the engineers of the future, complete with interactive classrooms and a mock street where they can learn in an outdoor replica of the real world. Our award-winning trainers will deliver 11,000 training days at our Scottish fibre school this year.
We’re also building greener – our fibre network uses less energy. We operate the nation’s second largest commercial fleet and want to help lead the transition to electric vehicles, with a target to transition our fleet to being electric in 2030.
Openreach legally separated from BT in 2018 and is independently governed, while remaining wholly owned by BT Group.
It’s highly regulated, with more than 90 per cent of revenues coming from services that are regulated by Ofcom. Any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2022, we reported revenue of £5,441m.
For more information, visit www.openreach.com