Openreach has put a number on something every UK small business owner has felt in their bones over the past year: our appetite for bandwidth is no longer growing gently, it is accelerating. On 8 August 2026 the network operator’s Director of Network Technology, Trevor Linney, reported that full fibre usage across the Openreach network rose by 37% in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025 — a jump driven by live television streaming, video game updates measured in tens of gigabytes, always-on video calling, and the simple reality of a household or an office running half a dozen bandwidth-hungry devices at once. For the millions of UK premises now sitting on full fibre, this is the shape of the new normal. For the small and medium-sized businesses still tethered to ageing copper or to a contended line they have never audited, it is an early-warning siren.

The headline percentage matters, but the story underneath it matters more. Full fibre — fibre-to-the-premises, or FTTP — now reaches more than 23.5 million UK homes and businesses, roughly 66% of the country, with Openreach targeting 25 million premises and better than 80% coverage by the end of 2026 and an ambition to reach as many as 30 million by 2030. As that footprint expands, the way people use it is changing the demand curve underneath every business connection in the country. This article walks through exactly what Openreach reported, why a 37% usage surge on the fastest tier of the network is a leading indicator rather than a curiosity, and what a UK SME should do about bandwidth headroom, contention and resilience before the next peak-time slowdown starts costing it billable hours, dropped VoIP calls and stalled cloud applications.

37%

Rise in Openreach full fibre usage, H1 2026 vs H1 2025

738GB

Average monthly usage per full-fibre connection (Ofcom, end 2025)

23.5M+

UK premises now passed by Openreach full fibre (66%)

108,599 PB

Total UK broadband data across Openreach’s network in 2025

What Openreach actually reported

The figure came directly from Openreach’s Director of Network Technology, Trevor Linney, and it is specific: full fibre usage across the Openreach network increased 37% in the first six months of 2026 against the first six months of 2025. Crucially, this is not a measure of how many people signed up — it is a measure of how hard the people already on full fibre are working their connections. Linney attributed the growth to a familiar but intensifying cocktail of demand: live TV streaming that has migrated almost entirely to the internet, video game downloads and patches that now routinely run to 50GB or more per title, the ubiquity of high-definition video calling for both work and family life, and the everyday reality of multiple devices in a single premises all pulling data simultaneously.

Set that 37% against the wider picture Openreach painted at the start of 2026 and the divergence is striking. Total broadband data usage across the whole Openreach network — every technology, copper and fibre alike — reached 108,599 PetaBytes in 2025, up 4.8% year on year. That is a meaningful volume, but the growth rate had actually cooled from 10.5% the year before. Full fibre usage specifically, by contrast, had ‘exploded’ by around 40% in the prior year and has now added a further 37% in just the first half of 2026. In other words, the average is being held down by legacy connections that cannot physically consume much more, while the full fibre tier races ahead. The network is not growing evenly; it is bifurcating.

Ofcom’s own measurement, published at the end of 2025, puts hard numbers on the gap. Average monthly fixed broadband usage per connection across all technologies reached 583GB, up from 531GB in 2024. But look only at full-fibre connections and that figure climbs to 738GB a month. Openreach has previously reported the average full fibre customer using around 22.1GB every single day — a number that reflects not just Netflix in the evening but HD video calls, large cloud file syncs, off-site backups and SaaS applications running throughout the working day. The people who have the capacity are using it, and their usage is what is compounding.

Why this is a warning for copper and contended lines

A 37% surge in demand on the fastest tier is not a problem for the businesses on it — full fibre is uncontended at the access layer and built for exactly this. The risk lands on everyone else. If your premises still runs on ADSL or FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet copper) or a cheap, heavily contended line, you share capacity with neighbours whose appetite is growing by more than a third a year. Their evening streaming and daytime cloud use is the congestion your VoIP calls, video conferences and cloud apps have to fight through at peak. The surge does not slow down to wait for the connections that cannot keep up.

How the demand curve got here

None of this happened overnight, and understanding the chronology helps explain why the trend is structural rather than a blip. The migration from broadcast to streaming, the shift to hybrid working, and the wholesale move of business software into the cloud have each added a layer of permanent, non-negotiable demand to the average connection.

2020–2021 — The hybrid-work step change

Video calling moved from occasional to constant. A single day of back-to-back HD calls can consume several gigabytes, and it happens during business hours, competing directly with everything else on the line.

2022–2023 — Cloud becomes the default

Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, cloud accounting and line-of-business SaaS turned the office connection into the critical path for nearly every task. Latency and packet loss stopped being an inconvenience and became a productivity tax.

2024 — Total usage grows 10.5%

Openreach records double-digit growth in total network data. Full fibre-specific usage rises far faster, ‘exploding’ by roughly 40% as more premises are connected and existing users lean harder on the capacity.

End of 2024 — 531GB average

Ofcom pegs average monthly fixed broadband usage at 531GB per connection across all technologies — a baseline that already dwarfs what most SME contracts were originally sized for.

Start of 2025 — 108,599 PB in a year

Total annual data across the Openreach network hits 108,599 PetaBytes, up 4.8%. The headline growth cools, but the composition shifts decisively towards the full fibre tier.

End of 2025 — 583GB average, 738GB on full fibre

Ofcom’s latest data shows the all-technology average up to 583GB, but full-fibre connections averaging 738GB a month — the clearest sign yet that capacity, once available, is quickly consumed.

First half of 2026 — the 37% surge

Openreach reports full fibre usage up 37% versus H1 2025, driven by streaming, gaming updates, video calling and simultaneous multi-device use. The fastest tier keeps pulling away from the rest of the network.

End of 2026 (target) — 25 million premises

Openreach aims to pass 25 million premises with full fibre — better than 80% of the UK — with a longer-term ambition of up to 30 million by 2030, subject to conditions. The addressable base for FTTP keeps widening.

Where the growth is coming from

It is tempting to file rising broadband demand under ‘people watching more Netflix’, but the reality for a business connection is broader and more relevant. The drivers Openreach names — and the ones that most affect an SME — span entertainment, work and the sheer number of connected devices. The chart below gives a rough, illustrative sense of how the major categories contribute to the demand a typical mixed-use connection now carries.

Live & on-demand video streaming

88%

Cloud apps & SaaS (business hours)

74%

Video calling & conferencing

69%

Game downloads & updates

61%

Cloud backup & file sync

52%

Simultaneous multi-device use

47%

Software & OS updates

33%

The pattern that should catch a business owner’s eye is the overlap. Entertainment demand peaks in the evening, but cloud apps, video calls, backups and file syncs peak during exactly the hours a business is trying to trade. On a full fibre line that overlap is comfortably absorbed. On a contended copper line, the daytime business load and the residential evening load can both push the shared segment into congestion, and it is the latency-sensitive traffic — voice and video — that degrades first and most visibly.

The full-fibre share of the network

One number frames the strategic picture better than any other: how much of the UK is now within reach of full fibre, and therefore how quickly ‘good enough’ copper is becoming the connectivity equivalent of an unsupported operating system. With more than 23.5 million premises passed against a total of roughly 35.7 million, Openreach’s full fibre footprint now covers about two-thirds of the country.

Share of UK premises now passed by Openreach full fibre, heading for better than 80% by the end of 2026

The direction of travel is unambiguous. As the footprint climbs towards 25 million premises this year and potentially 30 million by 2030, the availability excuse disappears for more businesses every quarter. A connectivity strategy built on the assumption that FTTP ‘isn’t here yet’ is increasingly out of date — and worth re-checking, because availability at a given postcode can change month to month as build crews complete a street.

Where SME connectivity actually breaks down

Rising demand rarely causes a single dramatic failure. It erodes performance at the margins, in ways that are easy to misdiagnose as ‘the computer being slow’ or ‘a bad day on Teams’. The grid below scores the common weak points we see when auditing UK SME connectivity, ranked by how often they turn into a real productivity problem.

Common SME connectivity weak points

Still on ADSL or FTTC copper where FTTP is available High

Heavily contended consumer-grade line, no business SLA High

No second circuit or automatic failover for critical services High

VoIP and video sharing an unmanaged link with no QoS High

Bandwidth sized years ago, never reviewed against usage Medium

Two lines that share the same physical path or exchange Medium

No proactive monitoring — users report faults first Medium

Router or ONT firmware and hardware long out of date Lower

What upgrading is worth by business size

Connectivity is one of the rare IT costs where the sums are genuinely legible: you can weigh the monthly line cost against the cost of the downtime and degraded productivity it prevents. The bands below are indicative rather than quotes — every premises and postcode differs — but they show the shape of the decision for UK SMEs of different sizes. Figures are illustrative and in £ sterling.

Business size	Typical current setup	Recommended direction	Indicative monthly cost
Micro (1–9 staff)	Single consumer FTTC or basic FTTP line	Business FTTP with SLA plus 4G/5G failover	£45–£120
Small (10–49 staff)	Single FTTP line, VoIP on the same link, no QoS	Primary FTTP with QoS and a diverse secondary circuit	£150–£400
Medium (50–149 staff)	FTTP or leased line, single carrier, ad-hoc failover	Dual diverse circuits with automatic failover and monitoring	£400–£1,200
Multi-site	Independent lines per site, inconsistent standards	Managed WAN with per-site resilience and central oversight	£1,200+

Reactive versus proactive connectivity

The difference between a business that rides the demand surge comfortably and one that is repeatedly caught out is rarely about spending the most money. It is about posture — whether connectivity is treated as a bill to minimise until something breaks, or as a managed capability sized and monitored against how the business actually works.

Reactive posture

What most SMEs do today

Buys the cheapest line that ‘works’ and never revisits it
Discovers contention only when calls start breaking up at 3pm
Has no second circuit, so any outage is a full stop
Runs voice, video and data on one unmanaged link
Learns about faults when staff or customers complain
Treats an FTTP upgrade as a project it never gets to

Proactive posture

Where Cloudswitched takes you

Sizes bandwidth to measured usage with headroom for growth
Checks FTTP availability and moves off copper on a plan
Runs a diverse second circuit with automatic failover
Applies QoS so voice and video are protected at peak
Monitors lines proactively and catches faults first
Reviews the contract and the demand curve every year

Percent full fibre usage growth in H1 2026 — the headroom your line needs to absorb

A five-minute check worth doing today

Two quick actions surface most connectivity risk. First, check FTTP availability at your exact premises — not your area, your address — because build crews complete streets month by month and yesterday’s ‘not available’ is often today’s live service. Second, dig out your current contract and note the line type, contention, contract end date and whether there is any failover at all. If voice or card payments ride the same single line as everything else, that is the first thing to fix, and a 4G or 5G failover router is often the cheapest resilience you can buy.

The story at a glance

Fact	Detail
Headline figure	Full fibre usage up 37% in H1 2026 vs H1 2025 (Openreach)
Reported by	Trevor Linney, Director of Network Technology, Openreach
Key drivers	Live TV streaming, video game updates, video calling, multi-device use
Full fibre coverage	23.5 million+ premises, about 66% of the UK
2026 target	25 million premises, better than 80% coverage
2030 ambition	Up to 30 million premises, subject to conditions
Total 2025 network data	108,599 PetaBytes, up 4.8% year on year
Prior full-fibre growth	Usage ‘exploded’ by around 40% the previous year
All-technology monthly average	583GB per connection at end 2025 (up from 531GB in 2024)
Full-fibre monthly average	738GB per connection (Ofcom, end 2025)
Daily full-fibre use	Around 22.1GB per day for the average customer
ISP mitigation	CDNs cache popular content closer to users
SME exposure	Copper (ADSL/FTTC) and contended lines have no equivalent buffer
Recommended action	Audit contracts, check FTTP availability, add diverse/backup circuits

How this connects to the wider connectivity picture

This surge does not sit in isolation — it is the demand-side counterpart to a run of connectivity and resilience stories we have covered through 2026. The botched FTTP install in Ilkeston showed how the physical side of the full-fibre rollout can bite a business, and why change control over who touches your lines matters as much as the speed you buy. The Brawband outage was a stark reminder that a single carrier is a single point of failure, exactly the risk this rising demand makes more expensive to ignore. On the security side, the N-able N-central zero-day and the wider rise of rogue AI agents underline that connectivity and resilience are one discipline with security, not separate purchases — and the GitHub outage showed how quickly a dependency you do not control can stall the working day. Bandwidth headroom, diverse circuits and proactive monitoring are the connectivity layer of that same resilience story.

Is your line ready for a third more demand?

Cloudswitched audits UK SME connectivity end to end — checking FTTP availability at your premises, sizing bandwidth against how you actually work, designing genuinely diverse resilience, and monitoring every line proactively so a slowdown is caught before it costs you a call, a payment or a productive afternoon.

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Frequently asked questions

What does a 37% rise in full fibre usage actually mean for my business?

It means demand on the fastest part of the UK network is growing far faster than the network average, and that appetite spills over onto the shared infrastructure everyone else uses. If you are on full fibre, your line is built to absorb it. If you are on copper or a contended consumer line, the growing evening and daytime demand around you is the congestion your voice calls, video meetings and cloud applications increasingly have to compete with. The figure is best read as a signal to check your own headroom before peak-time slowdowns start affecting productivity.

Who reported the figure and how reliable is it?

The 37% figure came from Openreach’s Director of Network Technology, Trevor Linney, and was first reported by ISPreview in August 2026. Openreach operates the physical network that the overwhelming majority of UK broadband providers ride on, so it has direct visibility of aggregate usage across tens of millions of premises. It is a measurement of real traffic across the first half of 2026 against the same period in 2025, not a forecast, which makes it a solid leading indicator of where demand is heading.

We are on FTTC copper — do we really need to move to full fibre?

If FTTP is available at your premises, the case gets stronger every quarter. FTTC still depends on a copper run from the street cabinet to your building, which limits speed and, more importantly for a business, offers less consistency at peak. Full fibre delivers symmetric-capable, uncontended performance at the access layer, which matters for uploads, cloud backups and video calls. The first step is simply to check availability at your exact address — not your postcode area — because it changes month to month as build crews complete streets.

What is contention and why does it matter more now?

Contention is the degree to which you share underlying capacity with other users. Consumer-grade lines are sold on the assumption that not everyone uses them heavily at once. As average usage climbs — 583GB a month across all technologies, 738GB on full fibre — that assumption holds up less well, particularly at peak times. Higher contention means more variability in the performance you actually get. Business-grade connections carry lower contention and service-level guarantees precisely to protect against this, which is why they matter more as demand rises.

How much bandwidth does a small business actually need?

There is no single number, because it depends on how many people work simultaneously, how much you rely on cloud applications, whether you run VoIP and video, and how much you back up off-site. The right approach is to measure, not guess: look at your real usage over a few weeks, factor in the growth trend — demand rising by more than a third a year on the fastest tier — and size the line with headroom rather than to today’s peak. Sizing to the current maximum leaves no room for the growth that is clearly coming.

What is a CDN and does it protect us from congestion?

A Content Delivery Network caches popular content — streaming video, software updates, large files — on servers physically closer to users, so the data travels a shorter distance and eases load on the wider internet. It is one of the main ways ISPs cope with rising demand. The important caveat for a business is that a CDN helps with the delivery of that cached content; it does nothing for the contention on your own access line. If your local connection is the bottleneck, a CDN elsewhere in the chain will not save you. Your own line and its resilience are what you can actually control.

Why does rising demand hit VoIP and video first?

Voice and video are real-time and latency-sensitive: they cannot buffer their way around congestion the way a file download can. When a shared line gets busy, the symptoms show up first as jitter, dropped packets and choppy audio on calls, and as frozen or degraded video in meetings. A large file will simply take a little longer and nobody notices; a VoIP call that breaks up in front of a customer is immediately, visibly damaging. That is why Quality of Service, which prioritises real-time traffic, and adequate headroom matter so much for any business that relies on calls.

What is a diverse or backup circuit and do we need one?

A diverse circuit is a second connection that follows a genuinely separate physical path — ideally a different technology or carrier — so that a single fault cannot take out both. For any business that cannot afford downtime, it is the single most effective resilience measure available. Even a 4G or 5G failover router, which does not depend on your fixed line at all, keeps critical functions such as card payments, email and cloud applications running through an outage. Whether you need one comes down to what an hour or a day of downtime actually costs your business.

When is the best time to review our connectivity?

Before you feel the pain, not after. The practical triggers are an approaching contract renewal, an office move or fit-out, a planned headcount increase, or the arrival of FTTP in your street. Failing any of those, an annual review against your measured usage and the clear upward demand trend is sensible housekeeping. Reviewing during a slowdown is reactive and stressful; reviewing on a schedule lets you plan the upgrade, negotiate the contract and build in resilience calmly, which almost always produces a better outcome and a better price.

How does Cloudswitched help with all of this?

We treat connectivity as a managed discipline rather than a one-off purchase. That means checking FTTP availability at your exact premises, measuring how you actually use bandwidth and sizing it with headroom for growth, designing genuinely diverse resilience with tested automatic failover, applying Quality of Service so voice and video are protected at peak, and monitoring every line proactively so a problem is caught before your staff or customers notice. It is the combination of these controls, reviewed each year against the demand trend, that keeps a 37% surge from becoming your problem.

Turn rising demand into a competitive advantage

While competitors wait for a slowdown to force their hand, Cloudswitched can help you get ahead of the curve — the right full-fibre line, sized for growth, made resilient with diverse circuits and automatic failover, and monitored so it simply works. Connectivity should be the thing you never have to think about.

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CloudSwitched

London-based managed IT services provider offering support, cloud solutions and cybersecurity for SMEs.