BT will spend £6 billion over the next three years to expand its fibre and 4G networks, and improve its customer experience.
Subject to regulatory “support”, the UK-based operator will deploy fibre broadband to a minimum of 10 million homes and businesses with “an ambition” to reach 12 million by 2020.
Two million of these will be connected via FTTP tech, mainly in new housing developments, high streets and business parks.
This follows a promise in March to deliver FTTP to all new building sites containing 250 premises free of charge.
BT said this threshold had now been lowered to 100 premises.
The announcement comes following Ofcom’s decision to open up BT’s Openreach arm and rivals’ plans to roll out pure fibre.
For example, Virgin Media said it would deploy FTTP to one million new premises last month.
The UK remains a laggard in Europe when it comes to FTTP deployments, failing to register on the FTTH Council’s ranking of the tech.
The remaining eight million premises will be connected via G.Fast, which BT has been testing over the past 12 months.
BT also revealed it is set to run technical trials of Long Reach VDSL technology “in the coming months” to reach the final five percent of the UK that is not covered by fibre.
Last week, BT-owned EE announced plans to increase the UK’s 4G LTE geographical coverage from 60 percent to 95 percent.
In terms of customer experience, BT’s Consumer arm now plans to reduce the standard time to fix line faults by 24 hours, as well as to handle 90 percent of customer calls in the UK by March 2017.
Openreach also announced new service commitments, including the halving of missed appointments to two and a half percent within a year.
A case management service team is also being established to resolve problems for customers who have experienced two or more missed or unsuccessful appointments.
It will also hire 1,000 new engineers this year and provide “multi skill” training to existing employees.
BT Group Chief Executive Gavin Patterson said: “Networks require money and a lot of it. Virgin and BT have both pledged to invest and we will now see if others follow our lead.
“Infrastructure competition is good for the UK and so is the current Openreach model whereby others can piggyback on our investment should they want to.
“G.fast is an important technology that will enable us to deploy ultrafast broadband at pace and to as many homes as possible.
“Customers want their broadband to be affordable as well as fast and we will be able to do that using G.fast.
“FTTP will also play a bigger role going forward and I believe it is particularly well suited to those businesses who may need speeds of up to 1Gbps.
“My ambition is to roll it out to two million premises and our trials give me confidence we will.
“Customer expectations are increasing all the time and we need to work hard to meet those new demands.
“That is why contact centre work is being returned to the UK and why Openreach is aiming to halve the number of missed appointments within a year.
“Customers want higher standards of service and we are determined to provide them with just that.”