Netomnia Start Fibre Rollouts in Newport, Huntingdon and Sleaford
Network provider Netomnia – supported by UK broadband ISP YouFibre – has today announced the start of their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network rollout across three new locations including Newport (Wales), Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire) and Sleaford (Lincolnshire).
The operator, which has already covered 265,000 UK premises with their optical fibre infrastructure (up from 210k in August 2022), currently aims to reach 1 million premises across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland with their gigabit-capable broadband network by the end of 2023.
At present Netomnia’s ultrafast broadband network is live in parts of 35 towns and cities across the UK, and they’re also actively building in 60 other towns and cities. The 3 new locations being detailed today have already been revealed as part of their rollout plan to the end of 2023 (here), but until now we didn’t know exactly what their plan was for each area.
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The operator is currently deploying at a full fibre build rate of 30,000 premises passed per month. But they will face competition from other gigabit-capable broadband networks in many of their build locations.
The Latest 3 New Rollout Areas
Newport (Wales) – up to £21.6 million
Premises Target: 72,000
Contractor: O’Connor Utilities
Huntingdon (Cambridgeshire) – up to £11.4 million
Premises Target: 38,000
Contractor: Opals Group
Sleaford (Lincolnshire) – up to £5.5 million
Premises Target: 18,500
Contractor: Light Source
The service is supplied to consumers via YouFibre, which offers unlimited usage, symmetrical speeds, a Wi-Fi router, free installation and 24/7 UK based support. Customers pay from just £22 per month on an 18-month term for their unlimited 50Mbps package, which rises to £45 if you want their top 900Mbps plan (£50 thereafter). This is currently being offered to new customers with between 3 and 6 months of free service.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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really cool and all, but still waiting for them to finish my area. 6 months, still waiting and the worst part is you have no idea what’s going on, because they won’t tell you but I keep seeing new areas all the time but they’re not finishing the ones they started.
Same in my area. The did some of the postcodes and then skipped some of them to make another set of postcodes. There is no logic in this, they are hopeless. I am on expensive OFNL so I was happy when they started rolling. But now I think I will wait for Openreach to finish in my town.
@John ofnl unfortunately does not allow access to their infrastructure unlike openreach, so other providers can’t get in your properties without insane amounts of digging
They’ve a ton of teams working in parallel. They aren’t taking resources away from one place to build another.
6 months is nothing really. It’ll take them a couple of years to do a large town. They can’t devote everything to finishing one place before working on another.
My own city was started in January and at current pace has a good year and a half to go. Just how it is. Most efficient way to pass at many premises as possible is lots in parallel.
They aren’t taking resources away from one place to build another.
Sigh. Yes, they’ve got an unlimited supply of network architects and engineers. (I’m not referring to cable pullers here). Do you ever give up gatekeeping?
Networks are architected once then the next one is done. Field surveys are done once, Netomnia do build architecture and build assurance. The bottleneck is at the build stage, getting the fibre into the ducts. Complete one area before moving onto another said architects end up doing nothing while they wait for the workflow to catch up.
Network engineers working direct for Netomnia/YouFibre are used for a pretty small part of the build process relative to the total time taken to pass an exchange. The OLT, router and backhaul installation are a fraction of the workload relative to getting the fibre in the ground and spliced.
Given you seem to feel the need to respond to so many of the comments I make please be aware that I am happily married and not interested, but am flattered by the attention.
Alot of the time – it’ll be a race to get their equipment onto Openreach’s Poles throughout the town. Building by PIA is much more cost effective for these companies.
Therefore they’ll start works throughout and then loop back around to finishing the works, once they have strategically got their equipment throughout the town.
@John
There is a OR infrastructure as well as Netomnia has confirmed that my postcode is included in their roll-out.
I very rarely find cases where there is both ofnl and openreach but more power to you
Any chance they can actually finish off Frome which was started months ago… Still waiting.
30,000 premises a month across over 50 towns and cities. I imagine you’ve a while to wait yet before Frome is finished.
FTTP builds take time.
Will be waiting in Wrexham, but BIDB.uk is a good place to start for roadworks and operations in your areas.
Would they build in existing Openreach FTTP areas (including rural)?
The pricing appears competitive, but they do not seem to consistently cover the areas they mention. Have heard of those who receive postal flyers from them with a Youfibre offer to join, to find their postcode is not in an available area when they go to the website.
Surprised to see another FTTP build in Sleaford! Openreach only recently seem to have finished rolling out FTTP to most of the town and already face competition from the alt net LightSpeed who are just going live to order now. It seems when one full fibre rollout begins, others soon follow… Interested to know how Netomnia’s offering compares. I took out a 1 gig connection with LightSpeed last week after holding fire on OR FTTP, which is £40 p/m for symmetrical down and up (~1050 for both in practice) and something OR providers can’t match in price or performance.
Interesting choice of Newport as there’s already fairly good VM coverage…