YesFibre Start New UK FTTP Broadband Network in Staffordshire

A new network operator and UK ISP called YesFibre has announced that they’re in the process of starting their first build of a new 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which will initially serve the market town of Rugeley in Staffordshire (England).

The operator, which was originally the brainchild of Hyperoptic’s former Head Of Engineering and the present MD of PICH Telecoms, Liam Dibley, first cropped up on our radar over a year ago after seeking Code Powers from Ofcom (here).

Since then, they’ve been busy preparing their plans and have gained additional civil engineering experience, funding and resources from Kieran Majevadia, the current MD of Mia Direct, which is a contractor with a history of working on similar projects for major operators.

The good news is, after all that time, YesFibre is now finally entering the early survey and build phase. The first pilot deployment will cover 300 homes (THP) in the Staffordshire town of Rugeley, but if all goes well, they’ll then expand out to complete that build to around 10,000 premises across the town. After that there are tentative ambitions to build into Lichfield and Stafford etc.

The new network will be based off hardware from Ubiquiti, specifically the GPON 1024 Optical Line Terminal (OLT) and associated Optical Network Terminals (ONT) in homes. Meanwhile, key fibre build materials and infrastructure will come from suppliers including HellermannTyton, Hexatronic and GDS.

At present, we don’t yet have any solid information on precisely how much investment is behind the operator, what the packages will cost or the operator’s build timescale. But we’re told by the operator’s Director, Gavin Bing, that the first customer connections could potentially go live within the next week or so.

At this point we should highlight that Rugeley is already home to one gigabit-capable broadband network from Virgin Media (VMO2). Furthermore, Openreach have plans to deploy into the same town, although the latter has yet to make much progress and so an opportunity does still exist.

The challenge for YesFibre is that they’ll be arriving in an increasingly busy market with no shortage of rivals to consider (AltNets), most of which have been in the deployment phase for a lot longer. But so long as the funding and business case exists then there will continue to be plenty of activity, even if newer entrants may find it harder to build scale than the earlier ones.

Going forward, YesFibre appears to be looking primarily at the wholesale path post-build (i.e. opening their network up for use by other ISPs). We wish them well and look forward to seeing how they progress over the coming years.