The scores of fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) altnets that are still going concerns across the UK are, from a market competition perspective, mainly battling against Openreach, the quasi-autonomous wholesale fixed access network division of national operator BT Group: One of Openreach's prime weapons is its sheer scale. In presenting its most recent financial results (for the first half of its current fiscal year), BT congratulated itself on the progress Openreach is making with the deployment of its FTTP network, which now passes 16 million UK premises, about half of the country and is more than halfway towards the target of 25 million premises passed by the end of 2026. In an effort to ensure it actually achieves that target, Openreach has upped its rollout objective for the current year to 4.2 million additional premises passed.