Rural UK broadband ISP Gigaclear has announced that their ongoing £38m investment to expand their UK Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network into Buckinghamshire (England), which has already covered around 19,000 premises, is being extended to reach 1,700 homes in the village of Great Missenden. But they’re not alone.

The first deployment work in Great Missenden is due to get underway in February 2023, and it will then join several other locations in the county where Gigaclear has already built, or are building, including Aston Clinton, Naphill, Chesham Bois, Great Missenden, Haddenham and Buckingham. A number of other locations in the region are also being planned for the future.

NOTE: The Infracapital-backed ISP is investing up to £700m to reach 500,000 UK premises by the end of 2023 (they’ve already covered 380,000).

However, the move is interesting, since a number of other alternative and gigabit-capable broadband networks, such as via Swish Fibre and Trooli, are also deploying across the same area. Not to mention Openreach’s FTTP build and the fact that F&W Networks is nearby doing the same.

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The fifth contract awarded under the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme – worth £36 million – has today been handed to UK ISP Wildanet, which will upgrade connectivity for more than 19,250 hard-to-reach homes and businesses across rural parts of Cornwall in South West England.

At present, Wildanet is already in the process of deploying their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network – backed by an investment of £50m from the Gresham House British Strategic Investment Infrastructure Fund (BSIF) – to reach rural premises across rural parts of Cornwall and Devon (they also operate a slower fixed wireless network). But the operator has, thus far, been quite vague about how much progress they’ve made.

NOTE: Around 73% of UK premises can already access a gigabit network (c. 45% via just FTTP) – see here.

By comparison, Project Gigabit aims to extend 1Gbps capable (download speeds) networks to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (here). Commercial investment is expected to deliver around 80% of this, which leaves the government’s scheme to focus on tackling the final 20% (mostly rural and some sub-urban areas), where the private sector alone often fails. The project is technology neutral, so it can be delivered via either “full fibre” FTTP, Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) or fixed wireless access (e.g. 5G), but FTTP favoured.

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Cityfibre has today confirmed that they’ve begun the construction phase of their £50m project – supported by civil engineering firm Lanes-i – to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to “almost every home and business” in the Kent (England) town of Maidstone.

So far as we can tell, most of the operator’s initial build will be focused upon the Allington area of Kent, but they’ll face plenty of competition from gigabit-capable rivals. Virgin Media already has strong coverage of the town, while both Openreach and Netomnia (YouFibre) are also deploying their own full fibre in the same location. Some limited coverage also exists from Hyperoptic and OFNL, while Trooli has a nearby rollout in Loose.

NOTE: Cityfibre is supported by ISPs like Vodafone, TalkTalk (Future Fibre), Zen Internet, Giganet, iDNET and more, but they aren’t all live or available in every area yet.

The build forms part of Cityfibre’s wider effort to cover up to 8 million premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). So far, the operator has already covered 2 million UK premises, including 1.8m Ready For Service (RFS) via ISPs (here).

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Leicester-based UK broadband ISP Gigabit Networks, which until now had seemed to focus on connecting premises across the Midlands of England via CityFibre‘s full fibre (FTTP) network, has now confirmed that their services will also be available via FullFibre Limited‘s gigabit-capable network.

FullFibre Ltd typically deploys its network as a wholesale platform via Fibre Heroes for other ISPs to harness (i.e. consumers should visit that site to check coverage). The operator is currently targeting 80+ towns (34 are already in-build) across parts of 11 different counties (e.g. Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire). At present, their aim is to reach “at least” 500,000 premises by 2025.

Gigabit Networks will thus join several other ISPs in offering services over FullFibre’s new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, including the likes of Air Broadband, BeFibre, Gigabit Networks, iDNET, Link Broadband, Merula, OctaPlus, Redline, Squirrel and ZYBRE.

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Internet service provider iTalk has finally branched-out beyond its old ADSL and Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) based home broadband packages by launching a new range of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) powered services on Openreach’s national network. Some of their new full fibre packages have also been discounted.

Each of the new full fibre packages include a digital phone (IP based) service, as well as unlimited usage, a 24-month minimum contract term, UK based support and an included wireless router. On top of that, you’ll need to pay £12.95 (one-off) for postage and packaging.

The new packages start from £29.99 per month for a 40Mbps download speed and rise up to £44.99 per month for their top 220Mbps tier. But the packages can also be taken as part of a “Winter Special” deal, which for example drops the 40Mbps plan to £23.99 and the 220Mbps service to £39.99 per month. Sadly, they don’t currently offer a gigabit tier or anything faster than 220Mbps.

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The UK Government is in the process of publishing the King’s New Year Honours List for 2023, which sees Brendan Dick, the former Director of BT in Scotland (2006-18) and former Chair of Openreach’s Scotland Board (2018-21), picking up an OBE for services to telecommunications in Scotland. But he’s not alone.

The King’s New Year Honours list is said to recognise the achievements and public service of people across the UK, from all walks of life. Anyone can nominate someone for an honour, and nominees are then “checked by various government departments to make sure they’re suitable for an honour” (this may include checks by HMRC) and an honour’s committee will also review the nominations.

As well as the OBE award for BT’s Brendan Dick, TalkTalk’s former Early Careers Manager (until October 2022), Sam Davys, has been awarded an MBE for services to Young People and to Inclusion in Digital Industries. She’s now in a different role at the ISP, but the award recognises her work under the provider’s Kickstart program during the pandemic, whereby the DWP provided funding to employers to create jobs for 16- to 24-year-olds on Universal Credit.

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Broadband and mobile operators EE (BT) and Vodafone have announced that they’ve extended their 4G network on the London Underground to include six more stations, covering parts of the Central and Northern lines, which reflects a partnership with BAI Communications. This builds on their already live coverage on the eastern half of the Jubilee Line.

At present, BAI holds a 20-year concession deal with Transport for London (TfL), which was signed in June 2021 (here) and allows them to build the new 4G mobile infrastructure itself and to then make it available via wholesale for Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to harness. The goal of this is to cover the entire London Underground with the new network by late 2024 (ticket halls, platforms and tunnels).

NOTE: O2 (VMO2), Three UK, EE and Vodafone have all signed deals to harness the new infrastructure. The new network is classed as “5G-ready“.

The neutral host distributed antenna system (DAS) network, which will end up being supported by hundreds of kilometres of fibre optic cable laid in tunnels for data capacity (fitted outside operational hours), was first trialled on the Jubilee Line (eastern half of the line). The first new sections beyond that are now starting to go live.

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Openreach (BT) has published the Tranche 9 batch of 65 new UK exchange areas where they plan to move away from copper-based analogue phone (PSTN / WLR etc.) services and on to a new all-IP network, which will also occur once over 75% of premises in an area can get their “ultrafast broadband” (FTTP and G.fast at 300Mbps+).

At present there are two different, albeit closely related, stages to moving away from the old copper line infrastructure. The first starts with the gradual migration of traditional voice (PSTN) services to all-IP technologies (e.g. SOGEA), which is due to complete by December 2025 and is occurring on copper line products (i.e. copper and full fibre ISPs are both introducing digital VoIP style voice solutions for customers).

The second stage involves the ongoing rollout of faster Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband infrastructure – using light signals via optical fibre, instead of slower electrical signals via copper. Only after this second stage has largely completed in an exchange area can you really start to switch-off copper in favour of fibre, which is a longer process as you have to allow a few years for user migration.

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Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today added 12 new places (towns and villages) to their £15bn rollout of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network, which also includes a few corrections due to past errors and a larger build on the Isle of Wight. Some 8 million premises are now covered.

The rollout, which has just reached 8 million UK premises (inc. 2.5m in the hardest to reach “final third” of the country), is currently running at a build rate of c.58,000 premises per week and this is predicted to peak at c.75,000 premises at some point in the near future (i.e. up to 4 million premises per year, which compares with the 1.9 million added in 2020/21).

NOTE: Openreach’s goal is to reach 25 million premises (80%+ of the UK) by December 2026 and 6.2 million of those being targeted are in rural and semi-rural areas (here).

A big chunk of the new list – reflecting a total of around 140,000 premises – is taken up with the addition of locations across the Isle of Wight, which resides just off the south coast of Hampshire in England. Openreach were initially only deploying across the East Cowes area, but they’re now expecting to invest £13.5m in order to cover 45,000 premises across the island.

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