Sport Relief – we're part of the team

Openreach people have gone the extra mile for this year’s Sport Relief, giving their time to raise money and organise events – from bake sales to fancy dress parades.

Our volunteers also helped the telethon run smoothly, as donations topped £50million, and were involved in the BT Celebrity Challenges.

First up was David Walliams vs The Thames, as the comedian battled the elements – and other dodgy stuff – to swim 140 miles along the river.

We then had John Bishop’s Week of Hell – cycling, running and rowing 90 miles in just five days from Paris to London.

And last but not least, Freddie Flintoff set 14 Guinness World Records in just 12 hours.

We talk about making Openreach a fun place to work and leaving a legacy. Everyone who took part in our Sport Relief activities has done just that, while helping change lives for the better.

And there’s still time to donate.

Flexible fibre drives broadband round the bend

The boffins at Adastral Park, BT’s research & development centre, have been working on a new bendy fibre cable.

Being much more flexible than a traditional cable, “bend insensitive fibre” makes it easier to get fibre into places that we just couldn’t reach before. This in turn is helping us give more people access to a pure fibre connection all the way from the exchange to their property.

Fibre to the premises, as it’s known, provides speeds of 100Mbit/s download and 30Mbit/s upload. But there’s already a 300Mbit/s download speed on the horizon – and rumours of a 1Gbit/s ultrafast variant being developed!

You can see a video of the new fibre being tested at Adastral Park here.

Welcome to the Customer News Centre!

After a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind the scenes we’re delighted to unveil our Customer News Centre. 

This new state of the art online resource (hey, it’s more than just a website) replaces our bi-monthly news e-zine, Access, and the weekly Round-up email that contained briefings.

By bringing everything together in one place, accessible via a whole range of devices, we’re putting you in complete control. No more digging around on the portal for the latest briefing or having to wait for a quarterly news email – now you’ll be able to get the information you want, when you want, wherever you are. And we’ve also added a range of social media tools – like a video channel, twitter feed and, ahem, blog – to keep us bang up to date. Anything you need to know is now just a click away.