The amount of data travelling across Openreach’s Full Fibre network increased by 37% during the first half of 2026. That’s an enormous rise in six months and another sign that Full Fibre is rapidly becoming the ordinary way British households connect, rather than something reserved for people chasing the fastest broadband available.
The figure describes traffic rather than the physical size of the network. It also doesn’t mean the average household downloaded 37% more than it did last year. Openreach is connecting hundreds of thousands of additional properties every quarter, so much of the growth comes from people moving their existing streaming, gaming and browsing away from copper and onto fibre.
Openreach doesn’t sell broadband packages directly to households. Its network is used by BT, EE, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Plusnet and hundreds of other providers. Taken together, their customers now send more data over Openreach Full Fibre than through its older copper and part-copper services.
Image Credit: ISPReview
Copper is on its way out, with record numbers of customers now switching to Full Fibre
More than half of eligible households still haven’t connected
By the end of June, Openreach Full Fibre had reached approximately 23.4 million homes and businesses, with around 9.4 million actually connected. That puts take-up at about 40%. It’s growing quickly, but it also means six out of every ten properties passed by the network haven’t yet ordered a Full Fibre package.
Trevor Linney, Openreach’s Network Technology Director, says the figures show how heavily everyday life now depends on broadband. Streaming and gaming generate some of the most visible surges, particularly when major football matches, game releases or enormous software updates send millions of households online at once.
Openreach still has reasons to make the numbers sound as impressive as possible. It wants more households to move onto fibre so it can retire the copper network, while providers can usually charge more for faster packages. The company also lost 192,000 broadband lines to rival networks during the latest quarter. Full Fibre traffic may be soaring, but Openreach is still fighting CityFibre, Virgin Media O2 and dozens of smaller networks for the people generating it.
