Freedom Fibre Add 3 North West Towns to UK FTTP Broadband Rollout
Network operator Freedom Fibre, which aims to cover over 2 million premises in England and Wales with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network – supported by UK ISP TalkTalk, has today added three new neighbouring towns along the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire and Merseyside to their rollout plan.
The operator, which is being backed by a £84m investment from Equitix and a £16m Santander debt facility, was previously aiming to cover 70,000 premises by the end of 2022 (they had completed 40k by Nov 2022, but we haven’t had another update since then) and they have a long-term aspiration to reach over 2 million UK properties (Coverage Map).
The good news is that Freedom Fibre has today added the three neighbouring towns of Ellesmere Port, Hooton, and Bromborough to their rollout plan. Located along the Wirral Peninsula, nearly 48,000 homes and 2,500 businesses will, once completed, be able to access “lightning-fast broadband speeds” of up to 900Mbps.
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The build comes at the same time as Cheshire West and Chester Council’s successful bid for the UK Government’s “Levelling up” funding, which will also support the Wirral Council’s Digital Wirral Strategy. The ‘levelling up’ funding will be used to transform Ellesmere Port’s town centre, and Freedom Fibre hopes to bring additional value to the areas by upgrading full fibre for local premises.
Steven Warner, Freedom Fibre’s Head of Build Assurance, said:
“I’m really excited to be able to bring our superfast fibre network to the local communities. Full-fibre broadband will vastly improve the lives of people working from home and will give more flexibility for hybrid workers.”
Sadly, the operator doesn’t say how much funding is involved in this build or how long it will take to complete, but such a sizeable project is almost certainly reflective of a multi-million-pound investment. The catch is that both Openreach and Virgin Media (VMO2) already have significant coverage of their respective gigabit-capable broadband networks in the area, which continues to be expanded. Some other AltNets, such as Netomnia (YouFibre), are also targeting many of the same locations.
In addition, we missed another announcement recently, which saw Freedom Fibre confirm that they’d be investing £1.5M to rollout their FTTP network to cover 4,600 homes and 250 businesses in the North Wales town of Gresford.
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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Some of the planning notices attached to Openreach Poles in Ellesmere Port have seen a number of resident complaints as the plan is for FF to install poles and feed from them, the area they selected is already quite pole heavy (homes-built post war boom) and these already have Openreach FTTP.
A number of residents are questioning the worth of more poles for a single ISP to use given this is Freedom Fibres anchor tenant and they dont hold wholesale agreements with other ISPs at present.