Openreach Publish UK Pilot Pricing for FTTP Broadband Speeds to 8500Mbps
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/01/openreach-publish-uk-pilot-pricing-for-fttp-broadband-speeds-to-8500mbps.html
Discussion
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5.5Gbps (550Mbps upload) and 8.5Gbps (850Mbps upload) tiers
Ugh. Downstream faster than my home network can handle, but upstream much slower. Please just give me 1Gb/s symmetric!
@david_chisnall Yeah, I agree, I have only just upgraded my home LAN to 2.5Gb/s and there is no way I can afford to now upgrade to a 10Gb/s LAN
Added to which, the small business I support couldn't handle anything above 1Gb/s at the present.
@kim_harding I'm not sure what we have in the walls (it was laid by a the builders before we bought the house). It might be able to handle 2.5 GigE. But none of the things I connect to the wired network (laptop dock, Xbox, NAS, and so on) have more than GigE ports. But all of them can saturate a GigE link in both directions.
For downstream, my current link (BT's 900:110 plan) is almost never the bottleneck, but upstream is quite often.
Even my phone, over WiFi, can transmit data faster than my upstream connection can handle. And it's an Android device that came out four years ago!
@david_chisnall @kim_harding especially as the S in XGS-PON stands for symmetric - the underlying link is 10Gb symmetric. and even XG-PON is 1:4, not 1:10.
Later on, the article says they'll offer symmetric, but at 3300 Mb/s and up. I don't currently) have any use case for that. Even if I upgraded to 2.5GigE (and had a router with a 10GigE upstream port), that's still one port saturated while the others are quite busy.
But uploading things faster is an obvious benefit. I wonder if we can prod DSIT to kick Ofcom to stop artificial segmentation of the consumer and commercial markets in a regulated monopoly.