Broadband in Edinburgh: what reaches your address, and what you should pay

Check your address first

Direct answer: 11 to 15 gigabit networks are expected in Edinburgh by 2029, on Ofcom’s count, and none of them reaches every street or every stair, so the only true answer is the one your own address returns.

The rest of the page is there to make sense of what the check returns, which is why the check comes first: until you know which networks reach your stair, you cannot know which of the sections below are about you.

Full fibre, area by area

Direct answer: In January 2026, full fibre reached 84% of homes across the City of Edinburgh, from 94% in Edinburgh Western down to 70% in Edinburgh Central, according to Ofcom.

Twice a year Ofcom publishes a coverage figure for every council in the UK and, usefully for a city this size, for each parliamentary seat inside it. Edinburgh therefore comes in six pieces rather than one number. All of the figures here are from the Spring 2026 update of 13 May 2026, describing January 2026, and all of them count homes rather than business premises, which keeps them on the same base as the UK’s 82% and Scotland’s 75%. Two definitions matter. Full fibre, in Ofcom’s words, is “An access network structure in which an optical fibre runs all the way from customers’ premises to the local exchange or access node.” Gigabit-capable means “A network connection to a customer’s premises capable of delivering download speeds of 1 Gbit/s or more.” The second is the broader of the two, since Virgin Media’s cable counts towards it and towards nothing else on this page.

Two things stand out. The first is how far the centre lags: 70% could get full fibre in Edinburgh Central, against 94% in Edinburgh Western, and the two areas with the most tenements, Central and Northern and Leith, are the two lowest. The second is that the council area as a whole, at 84%, is only ninth of Scotland’s 32 councils. The leader, Midlothian, is just over the city bypass at 93%, and Glasgow is at 92%. Across the 361 councils in the UK, Edinburgh sits 154th. Good, then, but not the finished city the headline suggests.

The six areas are the Scottish Parliament constituencies inside the City of Edinburgh council area, which is how Ofcom cuts the city. The descriptions are ours and only rough; Ofcom uses the constituency boundaries. Full fibre and gigabit are the share of homes (residential premises) able to get each, Ofcom, January 2026, published 13 May 2026. Tap a column heading to sort.Swipe the table sideways for the homes column.

Two cautions before you read your own area off that table. An area figure is an average over forty to fifty thousand homes, and the streets inside it vary far more than the areas do between themselves: one tenement stair can be wired while the next is not. And “can get” is not “has got”: the next section is about how many Edinburgh homes have actually taken what passes their door, and that is where the city’s story gets uncomfortable.

Built but not bought: Edinburgh’s take-up gap

Direct answer: In January 2026, 40% of the Edinburgh premises that could get full fibre had a full fibre line, Ofcom says, which ranks the city 24th of Scotland’s 32 councils and 276th of the UK’s 361. Everyone else on those streets is paying for something slower than what already passes the door.

Openreach said it in its own release about the city on 3 August 2026, under a headline about people “yet to benefit”: “Most of Edinburgh is now covered by Full Fibre, but many residents and businesses still haven’t made the switch”. The same release puts the reach of its own network at “more than 75% of properties in the area now able to upgrade their broadband service”. Ofcom’s figures say the same thing with numbers: 40% of covered premises in Edinburgh had taken full fibre, against 47% across Scotland on our weighting of the council rows and “47% of all premises with access to full fibre” for the UK, in Ofcom’s words. Midlothian, next door, is the highest council in Scotland at 70%; West Dunbartonshire is the lowest at 23%.

Why Edinburgh in particular? Ofcom publishes the figures and not the reasons, so this page does not guess. Two things on the page are at least consistent with it: more than half the city lives in flats, where the line into the building and the line into the home are two separate jobs, and nearly a quarter of households rent privately, where the broadband contract often outlives the tenancy. Both are covered further down.

The take-up gap has a deadline attached. Once three quarters of an exchange area can get full fibre, Openreach stops selling copper broadband there, and the analogue phone network itself closes on 31 January 2027. Edinburgh is well into both, which is why they get their own section below.

The networks that build in Edinburgh

Direct answer: Openreach, CityFibre, Virgin Media with nexfibre, and Hyperoptic in some blocks of flats, with YouFibre and GoFibre building up to the city’s edges. Ofcom expects 11 to 15 gigabit-capable operators to be running in the council area by January 2029.

Behind every broadband bill there are two companies, and most people only ever meet one of them. The brand you pay rents space on a physical network, and in Edinburgh the big brands rent on more than one, which is how Vodafone or Sky can quote two prices on opposite sides of the same street. What follows is what each network itself says about the city, taken from its own website on the date shown.

Openreach, the network behind most of the big brands

Whoever you pay, there is a fair chance the line is Openreach’s: BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, EE, Plusnet and most of the smaller brands rent it. Openreach is also the only network that states an Edinburgh number and refreshes it. Its release of 3 August 2026 says “Full Fibre broadband is now available to over 215,000 homes and businesses across Edinburgh”, puts the spend at “around £64m”, and adds that there are “more than 75% of properties in the area now able to upgrade their broadband service”. Three quarters of the city on its own wires, by its own count; Ofcom’s 84% for the council area is every network added together.

Openreach also names the parts of Edinburgh it is working in, which is rare. Its Scottish release of 28 May 2024 opens its list of places next in line with “People living in Port Glasgow in Inverclyde, Possil in Glasgow, Wester Hailes in Edinburgh”, puts the Pentland exchange, which serves Currie and Balerno, in its table, and says of the new places: “They join 1.2 million homes and businesses across Scotland who already have access”. Nationally it says “Openreach’s Full Fibre network now reaches 23 million homes and businesses across the UK”, and that “The company plans to extend this to 25 million by the end of 2026, with the potential to reach 30 million by 2030 with the right investment conditions”.

CityFibre, the second wire under most of the city

CityFibre is the full fibre network that Vodafone, Sky, TalkTalk and Zen sell over, and in Edinburgh it is the reason so many addresses have two sets of prices. Edinburgh is on its coverage list under the heading “Cities served by our network”, with Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and Stirling, and the list says the network is “available to over 4.5 million premises across the UK”. Its last Edinburgh-specific figure is older than you would like: on 28 February 2022 it said “More than 65,000 homes and businesses across Edinburgh can now access the best digital connectivity”, that “In Edinburgh alone, CityFibre has invested £100m”, and that “CityFibre has been making great progress in Edinburgh since 2019”. It named Currie and Balerno among the finished neighbourhoods and Redford, Craiglockhart, Portobello, Wester Hailes and Kingsknowe as next, and said that “Once the city-wide rollout reaches completion in 2024, almost every home and business locally will have access”. It has published no Edinburgh completion statement since, so whether that 2024 promise was met is something only the postcode check can tell you for your own street.

Two things to know before you order. The brands selling over CityFibre in the city were “launch partner Vodafone, plus TalkTalk and Zen” in 2022. Its national provider list now runs to 44 companies, including Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen. Which of them serves your address only shows once you check it, because, in CityFibre’s words, “Availability can occasionally vary between neighbouring properties”. Nationally it reported 4.8m premises passed and 1,108k customer connections in its October 2026 trading update, and in June 2026 said it “has connected over one million premises”.

Virgin Media, on its own cable and on nexfibre’s fibre

Nobody sells on Virgin’s cable except Virgin, because Virgin built it and keeps it. The company has a second route into Edinburgh homes too: nexfibre, a separate fibre builder. The coverage report nexfibre published for the end of December 2025 puts Edinburgh in its current footprint, with Penicuik, Dunbar and West Calder close by. It warns that “locations listed as part of nexfibre’s existing footprint may or may not yet have services available and services may not be available to every premise in a particular location”. Virgin’s own Edinburgh page is candid about the patchiness: “What’s available to you will depend on where you live in Edinburgh and our speeds can vary street to street”, it says, naming the Royal Mile and Stockbridge by way of example.

One line on that page needs flagging, because it is the kind of number that ends up repeated elsewhere. It says “1.5 million homes in the Scottish capital can get gigabit speeds with our fastest widely available broadband”. Ofcom counts 273,911 homes in the whole council area, so the sentence cannot be describing Edinburgh, and Virgin publishes no Edinburgh coverage percentage anywhere we could find. Its newest dated Edinburgh announcement is from 2 July 2020, when it said “Edinburgh and Liverpool become the next cities to benefit from Gig1 offering average download speeds of 1,104Mbps”. Its page still makes the point that “Edinburgh was actually the first city in Scotland to get our Gig1 Fibre Broadband deals”. The standing caveat is “Virgin Media services are only available in eligible Virgin Media network areas”, and its social tariff is sold in the city: “social tariff broadband only deals in Edinburgh which start from £12.50 a month”.

Hyperoptic, which wires the building rather than the street

Hyperoptic builds to buildings, which in a tenement city is the whole point. “We only deal in full fibre broadband, which means we offer fibre all the way to your building”, it says, and “We focus exclusively on high density urban areas and cover 64 towns and cities in the UK”. One stair wired, the next not, is the normal pattern for a network like this, so its presence on a street tells you little about any flat on it. There is no Edinburgh page to consult: on 17 October 2026 the address where one would live answered “Sorry, we cannot find that page”. Its national line is “Our network now passes more than 2 million homes”, and in the blocks it serves its Fair Fibre social tariff costs £13 a month for 150 Mbps.

The builders at the edges

Two more networks reach the city boundary without crossing it on their own lists. YouFibre says “YouFibre is bringing 100% full-fibre broadband to homes across central Scotland”, and its Scotland list names Livingston and Musselburgh among its towns, with no Edinburgh entry. GoFibre says its fibre is in places “including Aberdeenshire, Angus, East Lothian, Fife, Scottish Borders, and beyond”, and its locations page names Dunbar, Haddington, North Berwick, Prestonpans in East Lothian but nothing in the City of Edinburgh. Both matter if you are in Musselburgh, Livingston or the East Lothian towns rather than the city itself. Ofcom’s count of 11 to 15 operators expected in the council area includes business networks and smaller builders that name no area at all, which is one more reason the address check beats any list, including this one.

What is coming by 2029

Direct answer: Not much more fibre, on the operators’ own plans: Ofcom’s planned deployments file puts Edinburgh at 86% of homes with full fibre by January 2029, up 1.6 points from January 2026, while Fife goes from 73% to 92%. What Edinburgh gets instead is choice: 72% of homes are expected to have two or more gigabit networks at the door.

Once a year the builders tell Ofcom where they intend to be, and Ofcom adds the answers up for each council. Edinburgh’s January 2029 figure comes out at 86% for full fibre and 94% for gigabit-capable coverage; strip out everything except the plans Ofcom rates ‘High Confidence’, meaning those that “have reached both the low-level design stage and for which funding has been committed”, and the gigabit figure is still 94%. The plans are solid, then. There are simply few of them, because most of the city was wired years ago. The same file expects 11 to 15 gigabit-capable operators to be running in the council area by 2029, with 72% of homes able to pick between two or more and 35% between three or more. Scotland as a whole moves from 75% to 91% on the same plans, and the fastest risers on Edinburgh’s doorstep are Fife and West Lothian.

The number that matters most for someone in the centre is the one Ofcom gives for postcodes with no gigabit-capable plan at all by January 2029: 396 in the council area. That is a small share of a city with 238,900 homes, but if you live in one of them the next three years will not change it, and the voucher below is the route you should ask about. Openreach’s own national plan, in its words: “The company plans to extend this to 25 million by the end of 2026, with the potential to reach 30 million by 2030 with the right investment conditions”. CityFibre said in 2022 that “Once the city-wide rollout reaches completion in 2024, almost every home and business locally will have access”.

Public money does not reach the city’s build, and the files say so plainly. No Project Gigabit contract covers the City of Edinburgh: the two Scottish entries in the gov.uk contracts collection are North East Scotland and Borders and East Lothian, where the government “awarded broadband provider GoFibre a Project Gigabit contract” to “provide up to 10,700 premises across the Borders and East Lothian”. Ofcom’s row for Edinburgh counts 68 planned new lines funded from public money. The Scottish Government’s own programme is for the hardest places: “Reaching 100% (R100) is a £600+ million Scottish Government programme”, and “The R100 contracts are delivering around 113,000 connections”, delivered by Openreach. Two vouchers still apply to an Edinburgh address that cannot get a gigabit service. The UK scheme says “Eligible homes and businesses can access vouchers worth up to £4,500” if “existing available broadband download speeds are less than 1Gbps”, and lists Scotland (Central and North) as lot 39. The Scottish scheme is the other: “The scheme currently provides a subsidy of up to £5,000 for eligible properties”, and it “will close to new applications on 20 November 2026”.

Your exchange and the copper switch-off

Direct answer: Edinburgh had 39,132 telephone lines still to move off the old copper network in September 2026, 8.82% of its 443,783 lines, on Openreach’s count, and the old network goes dark at the end of January 2027. Two city exchanges, Colinton and Liberton, were named in Openreach’s 2025 and 2026 copper stop sell announcements.

Edinburgh, like everywhere, has two separate changes running at once, and readers mix them up. One is the retirement of the analogue telephone network, a single national date that touches every landline. In Openreach’s words, “On 31 January 2027, all traditional phone lines will be going digital - so it’s important to switch now.” The other is “stop sell”, which happens exchange by exchange and changes what can be sold, not what you already have. Openreach defines the trigger this way: “Stop Sell is triggered when a majority (75%) of premises connected to a particular exchange can get ultrafast Full Fibre”. Once an exchange crosses that line, a mover, a switcher or an upgrader there is sold a digital line over fibre instead of a copper one.

Edinburgh is further along than most big cities and not as far as some. Openreach’s league table of 17 September 2026 counted 39,132 lines left to convert in the Edinburgh area out of 443,783, which is 8.82%, behind Liverpool’s 6.35% but ahead of Glasgow’s 10.60% and London. The footnote matters: “Numbers calculated using Openreach regional patch data”, which takes in the wider postcode districts rather than the council area alone.

On stop sell, Openreach’s 2025 and 2026 announcements name two Edinburgh exchanges: Colinton on 25 July 2025 and Liberton on 22 January 2026. Around the city they name Loanhead on 27 July 2026, and Midcalder and Garvald on 22 January 2026. The newest list, on 8 October 2026, names Dechmont, Kirkcaldy and Newport-on-Tay; that release added “a further 112 new exchange locations, covering more than 600,000 new premises” and said that by 5 November “rules will have been activated in 1663 exchanges across the UK”, at which point “around 16.4 million premises are under active Stop Sell”. Most of Edinburgh’s exchanges were named in earlier years, which is why so few appear in the recent lists; the full list is on Openreach’s own stop sells page, and our landline switch-off checker tells you where your line stands.

Stop sell changes what can be sold at an exchange, not what you already have. Openreach’s own stop sells page carries every exchange named in every round, and our landline switch-off checker turns it into an answer for your line.

Seeing your exchange on one of those lists does not touch the service you have today. It means your next change of provider, package or address comes with a digital line over fibre, and your copper line retires with it. One household should act before then rather than after: anyone with a care alarm, a health pendant or a monitored security alarm on the phone line. Our care alarm guide explains what to test and whom to tell, because a digital line behaves differently in a power cut.

If you live in a tenement, the stair decides

Direct answer: In an Edinburgh flat the street is the wrong unit. The council’s Census summary says “55.96% of Edinburgh population live in flats or apartments”, and a network can pass the front of a stair without serving a single flat in it until the owners agree to let the cable in.

Edinburgh is where the flats are, and where the renters are. The City of Edinburgh Council’s summary of the 2022 Census puts it at “55.96% of Edinburgh population live in flats or apartments” and “23% of households in Edinburgh are privately rented: 55,000 of 239,000 occupied households”. A network can pass the front door of a stair and still not serve it, because getting a cable into a shared building needs the agreement of whoever owns it, which in a tenement means the owners together, usually through the factor. That is why Hyperoptic talks about buildings rather than streets, why CityFibre signed a deal in 2021 for “More than 900 social housing properties in Edinburgh” with Prospect Community Housing in Wester Hailes, and why the postcode checker will sometimes show your neighbour across the landing an option it does not show you.

Renting does not stop you switching. Where a line already exists, changing the provider on it is your decision, and a landlord’s permission is only needed when something new has to be installed in the fabric of the building. Two of our guides take it from there: can you switch broadband in a rented property, and a tenant’s rights to full fibre for when the owner goes quiet. Owners on a stair have the opposite question, which is what the factor is being asked to sign; the wayleave guide answers it, and the short version is that saying yes costs the building nothing. Students in halls have a page of their own: broadband in student halls.

Cheaper broadband if you receive certain benefits

Direct answer: If you receive Universal Credit, Pension Credit or certain other benefits, four of the providers selling in Edinburgh run a social tariff, from £12.50 a month, and Ofcom’s rule for all of them is that “It costs nothing to leave. You won't pay a fee to leave the tariff before the end of your contract.”

Hyperoptic’s Fair Fibre Plan is £13 a month for 150 Mbps in the buildings it serves. Virgin Media’s Essential Broadband is £12.50 a month on a 30-day rolling contract, and its Edinburgh page says it sells “social tariff broadband only deals in Edinburgh which start from £12.50 a month”. BT Home Essentials, over Openreach, is £16.50 a month, and Vodafone Essentials, over Openreach or CityFibre, is £20 a month for up to 80 Mbps over 12 months. Sky’s is the exception for a new customer: “Our Sky Broadband Basics offer is only available if you already have Sky Broadband with us”. Every social tariff on Ofcom’s list, with who qualifies, is on our social tariffs guide, checked by hand.

Two pots of public money also apply to an Edinburgh address that cannot get a gigabit service. The UK Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme says “Eligible homes and businesses can access vouchers worth up to £4,500” where “existing available broadband download speeds are less than 1Gbps”. It lists Scotland (Central and North) as lot 39. The Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme is the second pot: “The scheme currently provides a subsidy of up to £5,000 for eligible properties”, and it “will close to new applications on 20 November 2026”. If you are in one of the 396 postcodes Ofcom lists with no gigabit plan, ask about it before then. Both are paid to the builder, not to you.

Look up your part of the city

Direct answer: Pick your area and this shows its Ofcom figures and where it ranks out of six. It runs on your device and sends nothing anywhere.

What this page used to say

Direct answer: Four corrections, all to coverage numbers that had no source. The previous page overstated the city’s full fibre coverage by two points and its gigabit coverage by three, understated Openreach by ten, and gave CityFibre and Virgin Media figures that neither company has published.

The earlier version of this page, which some of you will have read, got things wrong. Across eight thousand words it recommended providers for named neighbourhoods, quoted an average speed from a crowd-sourced test, and gave typical prices street by street, and not one of those could be followed back to an operator or to Ofcom. Anything untraceable has been removed rather than tidied up, and wherever an operator’s own statement differs from ours, theirs is quoted and ours is withdrawn. The page also stops telling you which provider is “best” in Bruntsfield or Leith. That cannot be known without checking the address, so it says so and points you to the check.

In short

1. Edinburgh is one council and six very different pieces: full fibre ran from 70% in Edinburgh Central to 94% in Edinburgh Western in January 2026, on Ofcom’s figures.
2. Across the council area, 84% of homes could get full fibre, against 75% for Scotland and 82% for the UK, which puts Edinburgh ninth of Scotland’s 32 councils.
3. Take-up was 40% of covered premises, among the lowest in Scotland, so on most Edinburgh streets the fibre is in the pavement and not in the homes.
4. Openreach’s own Edinburgh figure is 215,000 homes and businesses passed, as of August 2026, and its own words are that “Most of Edinburgh is now covered by Full Fibre, but many residents and businesses still haven’t made the switch”.
5. CityFibre’s newest Edinburgh figure is 65,000 homes and businesses from February 2022; Virgin Media publishes no Edinburgh percentage; Hyperoptic has no Edinburgh page.
6. On the plans the operators gave Ofcom, full fibre reaches 86% of Edinburgh homes by January 2029, up 1.6 points, while the neighbouring councils rise far faster.
7. Edinburgh had 39,132 lines still to move off the old copper network in September 2026, and the whole telephone network goes digital on 31 January 2027.
8. Only Openreach publishes an Edinburgh coverage percentage, and only for its own network. Every other figure on this page is the regulator’s, and the only one that is true for you is the one your own address returns.

Every line above can be quoted on its own with its date. A person re-reads this page at least once a quarter; the last read was on 19 October 2026.