Ofcom Says Fibre Will Reach 92% by 2028. So Why Are 6,950 More FWA Masts Being Built?

On 13 May 2026, Ofcom published its Planned Network Deployments report. It is a forward look at what network operators say they are going to build over the next three years, based on their stated plans as of January 2026.

Two figures in that report sit awkwardly next to each other.

Read those in the wrong order and it looks like someone has made a mistake. Fibre is close to finished. Why is anyone still putting up wireless masts?

Nobody has made a mistake. Both are true, and the reason they are both true tells you more about the UK broadband market than either does on its own.

What “92% fibre” actually means

The headline is the easy part. The distribution is where it gets interesting.

Ofcom breaks gigabit-capable coverage into urban and rural. If every plan is realised, urban gigabit coverage goes from 24.2 million homes (93%) in January 2026 to 25.3 million (97%) by January 2029. Rural goes from 2.9 million (66%) to 3.7 million (86%).

Look at that gap. Urban ends up at 97%. Rural ends up at 86%. And the rural figure is the optimistic one, because it assumes every commercially announced plan actually happens on schedule, which is not how build programmes have historically behaved.

So the 8% of premises without fibre in 2028 are not scattered randomly across the country. They are concentrated in exactly the places where digging is expensive, premises are far apart, and the return on a fibre spur is hardest to justify. Farms. Hamlets. Industrial units on the edge of nowhere. Sites at the end of a long private drive.

FWA lives in the gap. It always has.

Where the FWA build is actually going

Here is the nuance most coverage of the Ofcom report missed.

The 6,950 mast figure is not a 5G number. Ofcom’s fixed broadband reporting covers fixed line and fixed wireless access networks, and “fixed wireless access networks” in Ofcom’s terms means anyone delivering fixed broadband over radio. That includes the mobile operators, and it also includes the independent wireless ISPs.

The WISP sector has been quietly doing this for twenty years. Companies serving rural counties with point-to-multipoint radio from mast to premises, mostly in licensed and licence-exempt bands, mostly nowhere near a Vodafone press release. Several of them have taken public subsidy under gigabit programmes and have been upgrading their kit to hit higher speed tiers.

Ofcom specifically anticipates an expansion of FWA networks offering high-speed broadband services of at least 100 Mbit/s download. That is the threshold that matters. A decade ago rural FWA meant 20 or 30 Mbps and you were grateful. The 6,950 figure is partly new coverage and partly the sector re-equipping to clear a bar it could not clear before.

The mobile operators are not backing off either

If FWA were a dying technology, the operators would be letting it wither. They are doing the opposite.

On 11 May 2026, Vodafone launched 5G Broadband in the UK. The pitch is fibre-like speeds to an additional 3.7 million UK homes and premises, on top of an existing full fibre footprint of 23.2 million homes.

The commercial detail is worth reading carefully, because it tells you how the operator sees the product.

Two things jump out.

First, the “150 Mbps” headline is doing a lot of work when the entry tier is 50 Mbps and which one you get depends on where you live. That is not dishonest, it is just how radio works, and anyone who has actually deployed FWA knows the number on the box is a ceiling and not a floor. If you want to understand why, our piece on how 5G FWA works goes through the physics.

Second, the outdoor hub. Operators spent years pushing indoor windowsill units because they are easier to sell and easier to self-install. The physics did not change. Building materials still attenuate signal, and modern low-emissivity glass is genuinely hostile to it. Shipping an outdoor unit for rural homes is an admission that if you want FWA to work where fibre does not go, you have to put the antenna outside. That is a good sign, not a bad one.

Vodafone was also explicit about the target. The service was framed as being for households who cannot currently access full fibre, plus renters and students. VodafoneThree’s consumer director pointed at households stuck on connections that often reach only 74 Mbps.

That last one is the real market. Not the fibre-less. The fibre-adjacent, sitting on an ageing FTTC line, technically “served” and practically not.

What the analysts think, and why they are right

Omdia’s Diana Gorelik, principal analyst for EMEA service provider markets, gave RCR Wireless a read on this shortly after the Vodafone launch, and it is the most honest summary of the UK FWA position anyone has published this year.

Her view: FWA’s primary role will be enabling targeted broadband coverage in underserved or lower-density areas while helping operators make more efficient use of excess 5G network capacity. She described it as a flexible, lower-cost way to extend broadband reach and compete more effectively in specific segments.

She was equally clear about the limits. Capacity constraints and strong fibre competition limit its scalability, and over the longer term widespread FTTP deployment will cap FWA’s overall market share. Her conclusion was that FWA will remain primarily a complementary technology to fibre in the UK, but can become a durable alternative for specific segments. She named rural households, SMEs and renters as the long-term target groups.

Read that alongside the Ofcom numbers and the apparent contradiction dissolves completely.

Nobody building FWA in 2026 thinks they are going to beat fibre. They are not trying to. They are trying to serve the premises fibre will not reach, use spectrum capacity that is already paid for and sitting idle, and pick off customers whose fixed line is bad enough to be worth replacing. Those are three separate businesses and all three of them work.

Full fibre vs 5G FWA: which one wins where

Rather than a generic feature comparison, here is the split as the deployment data actually describes it.

The business case Ofcom does not report on

Ofcom’s Connected Nations reporting is about residential premises. It counts homes, availability and coverage. It does not count the reason a lot of our readers are here.

Three FWA use cases sit almost entirely outside Ofcom’s framing.

Failover

A retail branch, a surgery, a small factory with one fibre feed into the building has a single point of failure that no amount of fibre coverage percentage fixes. A 5G router on a diverse path is the cheapest resilience you can buy. The premises is already “covered” by Ofcom’s count. It is still down when the digger hits the duct.

Temporary and rapid deployment

Construction sites, event infrastructure, pop-up retail, emergency replacement. A leased line has a lead time measured in months. FWA has a lead time measured in the drive to site. No amount of fibre availability makes a twelve-week wayleave process go faster.

Sites that are never getting fibre because they are not premises

Substations, pumping stations, weighbridges, car parks, remote plant. Nobody is counting these in a residential premises base, and nobody is trenching to them.

None of these compete with fibre. They compete with waiting, or with nothing. That demand is stable regardless of what the FTTP percentage does, which is exactly why the FWA build continues while the fibre build finishes. Our guide to 5G FWA for business covers the router side of this in more detail.

The bit that will actually determine your experience

Coverage percentages are the wrong number to obsess over. Here is a better one.

Ofcom’s Connected Nations Spring 2026 update, based on January 2026 data, reports that 5G Standalone coverage outside premises now ranges between 49% and 85% across the three MNOs that have deployed it.

Sit with that range for a second. One operator has nearly twice the SA footprint of another.

5G SA matters for FWA more than it matters for phones. Non-standalone 5G leans on a 4G anchor and inherits its uplink behaviour. Standalone gives you the flexible uplink and downlink configuration, the lower latency, and the network slicing hooks that turn FWA from “fast downloads” into something you can put a business on. If your video calls are fine at 2pm and useless at 8pm, uplink contention is usually why.

The same report shows 5G coverage outside premises has increased by at least five percentage points for each MNO in the six months to January 2026, with individual MNO coverage now between 76% and 94%, and coverage from all MNOs rising from 47% to 64%.

So general 5G is broadly comparable between operators. Standalone 5G is not. That gap is the single biggest variable in whether your FWA connection is any good, and it is invisible on every coverage checker that just shows you a blue blob.

Where this leaves you

The two Ofcom figures are not in tension. They describe a market splitting into two.

For most of urban Britain, fibre is arriving, arriving again, and then arriving a third time from a different provider. FWA in those postcodes is a niche product for people who move often, cannot get a landline installation, or need a second path for resilience. Gorelik is right that fibre will cap FWA’s share there.

For the rural 14% that will still lack gigabit coverage in 2029, for the premises that are not premises, and for every business that needs a connection this week rather than this quarter, FWA is not a stopgap. It is the answer, and the 6,950 masts are being built because the people spending the money have worked that out.

The question to ask is not “will FWA survive fibre”. It is “which side of the split am I on”. Ofcom has published enough data for you to answer that for your own postcode, which is more than most regulators manage.