Historically, the UK has been serviced by two main broadband networks:
- Openreach – owned by BT, and available throughout nearly the entire country. Used by BT, Sky, Plusnet, TalkTalk, and many other providers.
- Virgin Media – available in around 50-60% of the country, and gradually increasing over time.
These are the two broadband networks that people are most familiar with.
However, since about 2018, a number of new broadband networks, known as altnets, have begun building and rapidly expanding their own independent broadband networks throughout the country.
For example:
- CityFibre – available throughout large patches of the UK. Used by Vodafone, Zen, TalkTalk, Sky, and a number of other smaller providers.
- Hyperoptic – available in many city centres and surrounding areas.
- Community Fibre – available throughout Greater London and some other parts of the south of England.
- Netomnia – available throughout large patches of the UK. Used by YouFibre and a number of other smaller providers.
- Fibrus – available throughout much of Northern Ireland.
As a consumer, you may find this confusing because some networks sell their own broadband service (such as Hyperoptic), while others only sell their service at a wholesale level to consumer broadband providers (such as CityFibre). Some do both, such as Community Fibre.
These days, some broadband providers use multiple different networks to service their customers. For example, Vodafone uses Openreach, CityFibre, and Community Fibre.
Which network is best?
The first thing to find out is which networks are available at your address, because you’ll likely only be able to get a maximum of two or three. You can do this on our postcode checker.
When comparing altnets, there is generally not a huge amount of difference between them.
They all offer download speeds of at least 900 Mbps, which is plenty for nearly any use case, and almost all of them offer quite reasonable monthly costs, depending on the provider you’re buying through.
They are often quite simple options, with few pay TV options or other add-ons, though some do offer landline calling as an optional extra.
The most important thing is that you have a decent competitor to Openreach and Virgin Media at your address, because this often allows you to get very fast broadband for a much cheaper price than you would otherwise be able to.
If you had just Openreach and Virgin Media available, and then a network like CityFibre or Community Fibre came along, chances are, you would be able to cut your broadband bill by 20-40% or more, while potentially also getting a significant speed upgrade.
Openreach and Virgin Media are both upgrading their networks to offer faster, full fibre connectivity, with symmetrical download and upload speeds.
The thing about the altnets is, at the moment at least, many of them are offering almost unbeatable pricing in order to try and attract market share.
How providers choose which network to put you on
Say you live in an area that has both CityFibre and Openreach access, and you go to the Vodafone website. Which network will they use to provide your connection?
The answer is that each broadband provider has its own prioritisation methods, which our comparison site accounts for.
In this particular case, Vodafone will put you on CityFibre. This matches the general logic that most providers use – they will normally use the cheaper, newer of the networks they have available at your address.
Switching to a new broadband network
If you are using a new broadband network at your address for the first time, they will likely have to do a bit of work to get you connected.
Your new broadband provider will arrange an engineer visit, which will normally take an hour or so, and the technician will finish off installing the last bit of cabling from the street to your house.
Note that the same is true when upgrading the technology type you are using even when staying on the same network – for example when switching from Openreach part-fibre to full fibre technology.