I wouldn't be so sure. They ran the fibre across the road from me just over two weeks ago and now its showing as WBC FTTP 300 is available. My pole had the planning permission application show up on Thursday, as it needs ducting.
There are also other areas that they did prior that have active customers already.
I think what might take a while is the exchange upgrade to support the Gigabit service, which is somewhat annoying as I was planning to go straight for that.
Another thing is I think my exchange already had FTTP for a new build for quite a while, so they already had the equipment to support it. An exchange with no existing FTTP may be waiting on hardware as due the silicon shortage its in short supply. So really, I don't think its some master plan, they're doing it as fast as they can per area.