The latest independent data from Thinkbroadband for July 2026 has today helped us to produce an updated H1 assessment of how big – in terms of network coverage (premises passed) – the top seventeen largest Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based UK broadband ISP networks have become. We also compare this data against official coverage claims.

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’ve often found that the official “premises passed” figures put out by some of those providers may not always reflect reality.

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 – the latter combines FTTP/B and Hybrid Fibre Coax (cable).

For example, in some cases official figures can include partially built areas that aren’t fully live yet and, in other cases, the network may be technically built, but customers in some of the covered areas won’t be able to get it ordered or installed by an ISP (i.e. not yet truly “Ready for Service” – RFS). Similarly, in a smaller number of cases, operators can sometimes make mistakes in their data.

The latest State of Broadband Report (July 2026) 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.

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’ve tended to perceive that TBB’s latest data can be up to around 1-3 months behind actual build.

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’s current pace of build. In addition, we’ve 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’s latest modelling. Suffice to say, gaps in the figures below aren’t always because an altnet may be overstating their progress

Finally, we’ve included TBB’s previous figures from September 2025 below, which helps to show whether a network operator has slowed its pace of build or even stalled.

Top 17 Largest UK Full Fibre Networks by Coverage – H1 2026

Operator	Premises July 2026 (Sept 2025) – TBB Analysis	Official Claim
Openreach (BT)	22.4 million (19.2m)	23.5m – Jul 2026
CityFibre	4.4m (4.3m)	4.5m RFS – Jan 2026
Netomnia (YouFibre)	3.2m (2.6m)	3m RFS – Jan 2026
Nexfibre (Virgin Media)	2.5m (1.8m)	2.6m – Feb 2026
Virgin Media (RFOG)	1.7m (1.7m)	It’s complicated (see below)
CommunityFibre	1.5m (1.5m)	1.5m – May 2026
Hyperoptic	1.4m (1.3m)	2m – Jul 2026
Gigaclear	642,000 (624,200)	618,000 RFS – Dec 2025
FullFibre Limited + Zzoomm	604,000 (602,000)	600,000 RFS – Jan 2025
Fibrus	455,000 (426,000)	465,000 – May 2026
Trooli	448,000 (444,000)	477,000 – Apr 2026
FreedomFibre + Truespeed	355,000 (new entry)	430,000 – Jul 2026
Grain Connect	316,000 (244,400)	300,000 – Jul 2026
AllPoints Fibre Networks	300,000 (299,400)	500,000 – Feb 2026
F&W Networks	296,000 (294,100)	410,000 RFS – Feb 2024
KCOM	290,000 (287,800)	307,000 – Apr 2026
Toob	288,000 (256,500)	280,000 – Dec 2024

As usual, we aren’t going to micro analyse each operator above and, in any case, most of TBB’s real-world focused estimates of Ready for Service (RFS) coverage are roughly where we’d expect them to be when compared with official claims. But there are a few caveats to point out for certain operators.

Firstly, Virgin Media’s network is currently in the middle of a major upgrade, which is seeing XGS-PON based FTTP being deployed into areas that could previously only access their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network. Currently, it’s 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.

Meanwhile, the nexfibre build is technically a separate company and so gets its own entry, despite only selling packages via Virgin Media and giffgaff. Officially, Virgin Media and nexfibre claim to have passed a total of over 9 million premises with FTTP (the missing gap above thus reflects Virgin Media’s HFC to XGS upgrades).

Otherwise, G.Network has dropped out of the table this time due to having a smaller RFS network than toob, 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 – proportionally – since last year’s update, such as Grain Connect, Fibrus, Gigaclear, nexfibre, Netomnia and Openreach. The pace of progress at others has either been very slow or stalled.

As usual Hyperoptic’s official coverage data continues to show some extremely wide gaps from TBB’s real-world analysis, and it’s a similar story for F&W Networks, albeit with the latter not having given us a clear coverage update since 2024 – making it harder to judge. APFN has also long shown a similar issue.

Finally, the table also sees the addition of Truespeed and Freedom Fibre (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’t fully RFS. Other altnets currently remain too small to be included.

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