Braintree – First UK Town with 5 Full Fibre Networks Overbuilding
New data has revealed that the Essex town of Braintree in England, which is home to just 56,000 people, has become the first location in the UK to show areas where five different gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP networks have overbuilt each other.
At present most of the country already has a significant number of competitive areas for full fibre networks (the physical infrastructure layer), although this usually involves more sustainable overbuild between 2 or 3 different networks. But we’ve also been seeing a growing number of places with as many as 4 networks being present in exactly the same place.
However, we already know of several locations where 5 or more FTTP networks are currently deploying, although until now we hadn’t seen any places where all five of those had physically built across the exact same part of a specific location (often it might be 1-2 in one part of the location and 3-4 in another etc.). Patchwork is the word of the day here.
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Nevertheless, the latest data from Thinkbroadband reveals that a small but growing patch of 425 premises in Braintree can now access a service from five different full fibre networks, including Nexfibre (Virgin Media), Openreach, SwishFibre, Lightspeed Broadband and Gigaclear. The figure rises to 3,629 premises when looking at parts of the town where four networks have overbuilt. Hyperoptic are also present, but not in the key area.
“Looking at the Braintree exchange 24,930 premises have one or more full-fibre broadband option and 3,115 properties still don’t have any full-fibre available, giving a FTTP availability of 88.8%. Looking at the wider Braintree District council which includes more rural locations the full-fibre availability drops to 66.1%,” said TBB.
The progress is impressive, but such a high level of overbuild is not without risk because it means more operators chasing the same limited supply of customers. Such an outcome is a particular problem in the current market, where most network operators are already under strain from a combination of issues, such as rising costs (build, leases etc.), aggressive competition from rivals (e.g. overbuild) and the related need to secure a viable level of take-up in order to satisfy investors.
News about jobs losses and build slowdowns became common headlines during 2023 and that only seems likely to get worse during 2024, with the spectre of consolidation looming large for a growing number of players. High levels of overbuild can sometimes also mean more disruption for residents, although in practice a lot of Alternative Networks (AltNets) end up sharing Openreach’s existing ducts and poles.
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One risk here is that some players – those that suffer a significant level of overbuild – may, over time, see the value of the fibre they have in the ground diminish to the point where, in the event of a need to consolidate, finding a buyer becomes much harder – raising the risk of a damaging collapse (fibre in the ground currently still holds a lot of value).
Ofcom has thus been keeping an open mind with respect to a revised Supplier of Last Resort process in case of any failures (here), although even in those cases it’s likely that the more viable parts of a network (e.g. those with less competition / overbuild) are likely to be saved by competing players. One way or the other, natural market dynamics and competition will sort all of this out.
In the meantime, consumers in a growing section of Braintree can enjoy the benefits that having an abundance of network choice tend to bring. Saving money being one of the biggest.
UPDATE 11:51am
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We should point out that Braintree may not be the only such location, but rather the first one that TBB itself has been able to spot and confirm as live (Ready for Service). For example, a small part of Sandhurst (GU47 0ZD) appears to have coverage from Openreach, Virgin Media, Trooli, Zzoomm and Swish Fibre (credits to Marcus at the Better Internet Dashboard for that).
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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What a waste.
It’s impossible that they’re all going to be viable/profitable, so some will just sit in the ground unused.
. environmentally friendly (not)
Jammy Dodgers.
Not jealous, not at all…….
What kind of commercial sense does this make? Even if you build in a less affluent area which is underserved by fibre, an operator would surely still get higher uptake than overbuilding in an area with loads of competition?
It’s more a question of to what degree it will occur, as we’d expect some natural overlap at the edges for quite a lot of builds. If it only occurs to a limited degree for an operator, then it may not be terribly significant. You can still build in a highly competitive area, but in your main focus you may only be predominantly overbuilding 2-3 networks, which is more viable.
Actually, there are examples of a high degree of altnet overlaps in some towns. For example, in Clacton there are currently 4 fibre networks: Openreach native FTTP, BeFibre, LitFibre, and Lightspeed, all serving roughly the same area, covering around 80% of Clacton. Yet, there are pockets in that same town with no fibre at all.
So frustrating when I can’t even get 1 fibre provider
Agree totally. They cannot possibly all be viable. Not even a sniff of a possible date here. And we are only 30m from London, so not remote!
You lucky bugger! I can only get Virgin!
Braintree has had 4 years of constant roadworks because of all these builds. There are 6 providers if you count OFNL. It started with Gigaclear over lockdown, with a bit of Openreach FTTP, then People’s Fibre gave it a go and went bust (taken over by Swish). Lightspeed then came along and did a lot of PIA deployment but not much of it is live months after the work has been done and the latest is Nextfibre, doing their own digging alongside where Gigaclear have just finished digging. Gigaclear have a pretty good takeup because they were first and covered areas like Rayne and Great Notley where the quality of FTTC was relatively low. Plenty of choice now.
But no addresses where all six are available.
Similar to the railway mania in the 1840s.
Didn’t a lot of the railway companies go bust with the investors losing their shirts? Just saying…….
But I don’t think there were ever five railway lines going in the same direction! Now we have HS2 (possibly) that nobody asked for, destroying countryside and costing millions, while the existing lines seem to run two or three carriages at a time at very high fares.
No but we’ve got 2 with a third being added. The Chiltern line out of Marylebone runs to Birmingham and the North West Coast mainline runs from Euston plus the wreck of HS2.
Would it have not been a better idea for companies to bid to cover a certain area, so everywhere gets one alternative supplier to Openreach / Virgin Media. So much disruption during construction and inevitably many of these companies won’t survive. Also unless it’s just me, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way of finding who covers any particular area, like a generic search site where you can see which companies have built.
Mmm first TBB have spotted but there are definitely other areas where there are 5 options.
Always happy to be pointed in right direction.
keep an eye on Ascot Andrew : Swish , Gigaclear , Trooli and City fibre and Openreach all building or have built.
Most will fail and go down the pan…
Ofcom already asked Openreach to be on standby if this happens ie talktalk with 4 million customers
Read :https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/04/broadband-supplier-last-resort-talks-debt-pressure-talktalk/
Do keep up, ISPReview has been reporting on SOLR for over a year 🙂 https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/05/ofcom-and-bt-reportedly-prep-contingency-plans-for-altnet-flops.html
Arrh right lol
Only been reading ispreview for last 6 months
I suspect that for completion reason they would prefer it to go to another Alt net
It would have been better say for each region o have just one other operator in addition to Openreach rather than the disruptive free for all we have at present
It is as well in my view that most of these alt nets will fail and be taken over
If you take the old cable TV network they did not manage to survive
This is one of the reasons why I prefer just to have one national operator to run the network like Openreach but others provide the service.
I don’t have multiple gas or electricity pipes to my house, why can’t it be the same for fibre.
Because “competition” is the government’s intended outcome, not “cheaper”, “better service”, “higher speeds” or “wider availability”.
The political classes (on both wings of politics) have ridiculously poor understanding of what markets do and do not do, but remain wedded to the idea that competitive markets are such a good thing that more competition is always a good thing. The disastrous consumer outcome of the deregulation of directory enquiries ought to have been an object lesson that competition is not a pancea, but politcos have ignored that and pressed ahead.
We had one and it failed.
More competition is always good if not for the simple fact that unlike a horribly run socialized service spending your own money not caring about costs, private companies spend money from other people’s pockets and no one cares if they fail
Capitalism works wonders. Socialism always failed
I would’ve had no problem at all with Openreach/whomever delivering dark fibre to every possible home, with PON as they sell now as purely a fallback where dark isn’t an option.
Phil: “private companies spend money from other people’s pockets and no one cares if they fail”
Well actually, it’s not out of other people’s pockets, it’s pension funds, it’s insurers, it’s companies managing savings, all taking equity risks, and it’s your and my banks providing debt to these companies etc. And aside from the fact that does affect most of us, you’ve also not noticed how whenever things go really bad in the financial services sector, it’s always the taxpayer who bails them out?
Building multiple overlapping physical infrastructure is an economic disaster in the making. Anybody stupid enough to think it doesn’t matter really needs their head examining.
Pension funds are a competition, if they feel it is a great idea to for example fund Gnetworks to overbuild on Community Fibre, BT and Hyperoptic then it is on them. People can choose more sane funds. There is also a reason why they even have several risks associated with them, you can choose high risk or low risk. Pensions are a ponzi scheme anyway
I agree that the taxpayer should not intervene but unfortunately we live in a society where private citizens experience theft when making gains and nothing when experiencing losses, while the “crony capitalist companies” socialize the losses
Having 2 networks is perfectly fine. 5 makes no sense but again, they’ve made their own bed. At least they’ve generated employment. It is nowhere near the level of stupidity that is the chinese construction industry where entire ghost cities become half built for no reason
You can have competition without the crazy free for all that we have with FTTH. I would argue that the free for all has increased costs and caused a lot of disruption and slowed down the coverage
I would say that at this stage we will see an increasing number of Alt nets fail. Strangely many rush to build in an area and then the build grinds to a halt having invested heavily in putting the fibre in
If someone builds in an area, the next one is cheaper because there are less blockages to encounter, so costs actually go down
The broadband market bears no resemblance to utility ones like gas and electricity where a single pipe or cable provides the service. I’m old enough to remember when BT was the only player in town, and I had to wait months to get a phone line in 1981. If cable operators had not been allowed in to dig up roads and pavements and get their coaxial cable into our homes and businesses we’d probably all be moaning about how slow our broadband over copper is. There is no question that competition from cablecos has driven the market onwards and Virgin Media in turn faces a lot of competition.
I used to cover bus duties there, the amount of travel restrictions because of this were just awful, I was always running late.
And I thought I was lucky with having 3! (Youfibre, Openreach and VM)
The government should have franchised the build and put it out to tender. That keeps costs down and avoids the expensive and disruptive overbuilds. To later in the day to do anything now. What will know happen is the disruption caused by failing alt nets. AS each month goes by the changes of Alt Nets failing increased. Most are currently trying to conserve cash. When that cash runs out they are in trouble unless they can find anyone willing to invest more cash
Absolutely ridiculous. Consolidation is inevitable, just as happened with the cable industry and mobile networks. Someone is going to end up with 2 or 3 networks in the same area.
The government could have had a scheme that incentivised building networks where there are none or few. It could even have generated revenues, with areas that are prime targets with lots of existing infrastructure being charged per connection, and those that are less attractive or with poor existing infrastructure being subsidised.
That cross subsidy requirement already exists for Openreach, as they’re the only company with a USO, and mandatory FTTP requirements. The new entrants don’t have those obligations, they just cherry pick the areas they want to serve, and leave the areas they don’t. This is unfortunately normal, that government’s obsession with competition as the universal panacea means new entrants are spared the costs and obligations of incumbents, and you can see how that panned out in the energy market, where 31 energy suppliers went bust, with costs of billions of pounds that have now been added to the standing charge, or met directly by the taxpayer.
it’s actually whackier than the cable networks of the 90s because those had exclusive regional monopolies, and didn’t overbuild each other in the most desirable areas. They also had BT sufficiently knobbled to avoid being a competitive threat.
A bit like spectrum auction for mobile spectrum, areas could have been “sold” to a maximum of 2 providers for say 8 years exclusivity.
But even without regulation, you’d think choosing to the the first provider in a non served area would bump up your share of the available customers
Code powers mean they could not be restricted to certain areas
A prize to whoever provides a photo of all five CSPs lined up on the front wall of their house
That’s part of the problem. In the days of ADSL/VDSL changing provider just meant plugging in a new router on changeover day. Now it will probably mean a whole new installation meaning customers are less likely to change than before.
This is such a valid point though.
I have VM and Openreach equipment. I honestly don’t think there is much more room around a logical entry point for any more. No one wants an ONT/ONU thrown up in the middle of their living room/hall because it doesn’t fit in a utility cupboard or behind the telly.
So, some people have more than they need, some people have none. Typical of the way the country’s been run in recent times if you ask me.
We’ve had city fibre here for a few years now, while walking the dog I see that almost every house has a brown city fibre box on the wall outside.
Nextfibre are creeping towards this location and I’ve seen openreach sub contractors pulling rope recently.
I can’t understand the idea that people will choose to switch to these networks, they aren’t cheaper and don’t offer symmetrical speeds.
What a waste of time and effort, so much for being green.
Morris Green in Bolton is in a similar position. No sooner than one provider finishes installing, another comes along and digs up the road. So far, they have
Openreach
Virgin
Grain
Citfyibre
Not going to hide that I’m jealous with zero options currently other than 30mb fttc or 8mb 4g. However I know I’m likely to have the option of trooli, giganet and vm at some point in the next 12 months. I’m just going to pick whoever is first as I’m so desperate. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of a rush to find areas of no coverage before being the 3rd or 4th overbuild though. 3 options is enough to give choice but who is left to take a 4th option? Surely everyone who wants fiber will have it at that point?
Trouble is the investors in these companies seem to be building with the intention of selling them on when the inevitable consolidation happens, therefore they tend to go where they can pass the maximum number of premises at minimum cost. This probably explains why some companies use poles even though it upsets local residents. They intend to sell them on so they don’t care.
Braintree is not particularly high density housing. Strangely Harlow which is one of the old new towns has quite high density housing yet has some of the lowest FTTH coverage so I do not think it as simple as that
How many telegraph poles does this equate to?
Not sure what you’re asking? How many were required or how many would’ve been required in KCom World?
It never ceases to amaze me how these sorts of things happen. Dunmow just down the road still only has FTTC.
dunmow not easy to build , not easy to get not that many premises from an altnet but in openreach proposed build plan for 2025 but no dates yet
Dunmow is a fair sized town without any fibre or Virgin Media so there are plenty of premises to make it worthwhile. Gigaclear for example have set up in a number of much smaller places nearby, for example, Henham and Stansted. Not sure why it would be particularly difficult to deploy it there compared to anywhere else?
The simple answer is there is not room for 5 operators the market is simply not large enough
If a 100% take up occurred which of course is totally unrealistic and it was spread equally between them it is only 20% for each. Some of the alt nets in Braintree are already known to be struggling
And it is highly unlikely it would be evenly spread. Whoever goes live first is likely to grab the biggest slice of the pie. Where I live Openreach have been live for 26 months and in my street got a 38% take up. In fact there have no new installs since JulY!. Our FTTC speeds in the street are very good (I was getting the full 80/20 before I switched) so many people are more than satisfied with that & there are quite a few elderly residents meaning that there are probably quite a few landline only customers. Swish have been installing this year but their progress seems somewhat pedestrian at best so what their take up will be if they ever finish remains to be seen.
Very true, 5 fibre networks for the same area is a bit too much.
For example, Lightspeed Broadband has a very low takeup rate, probably less than 10 thousand active customers, while its RFS coverage is probably now close to 200 thousand premises. This is just one example highlighting the need for altnets to focus on areas where there is less or no competition.
Did the government even think how this competition would even work? With Altnet’s to change ISP you will need an engineers visit to change the fibre over. The reality I suspect is most will not bother with that hassle
How about mandating that new fibre builds should be limited to networks operating as common carriers – e.g. Openreach, Cityfibre? There would be no incentive to overbuild.
This wouldn’t work. E.g. Openreach doesn’t do symmetric fibre, no XGS-PON, etc. Hence for this reason alone other fibre network providers are needed.
GNewton – A second fibre network would only be worth building if it were to be attractive enough to tempt customers away from the incumbent, which presumably is what supplying XGS-PON would do.
I actually live in Braintree and can tell you the majority of the population are sick to death with one lot digging up the paths only for a week or two later someone else does exactly the same, it’s been a nightmare for the past two or three years trying to get around the town. Please go away
Same for a lot of areas , Communties have facebook groups saying they are going to boycott the new networks being put in as a penalty to all the disruption and chaos they are causing .
Good for them i say ! When they get proper civil engineers installing their networks will this change
Communties have facebook groups saying they are going to boycott the new networks being put in as a penalty to all the disruption and chaos they are causing . – what will happen in is six months time you have people complaining there being left behind due to no FTTP another new facebook page will be created with letters to MPs etc etc
Question also is how many people want full fibre at all. Openreach have been live in our street for just over 2 years and so far they have 38% take up. There have been no new installations since July. The majority of houses seem to be happy with FTTC or are landline only (there are quite a few elderly residents). Swish are building but how much take up they will get remains to be seen.
Exactly , the demand is just not there at the moment
All this free for all will do, is ensure that Fibre companies cherry pick profitable urban areas, at the expense of everywhere else, including rural areas. And the governments privatisation, obsession, mania has ensured that the UK has had one of the slowest Full fibre rollout of any advanced country in the world bravo…
Except when they cherry pick the same areas…..
There are altnets largely focused on rural.
More expensive than the urban ones, for obvious reasons, but they’re there.
Issue really comes when you’re hoping for the same level of choice and pricing as the urban areas.
Realistically that needs cross-subsidy in quite a big way and only Openreach and VMO2/Nexfibre have the scale at the moment.
Looking up some data. Take Up pf FTTH in 2021 was 24% and in 2023 27% an increase of 3%
The economics for Alt Nets where they are overbuilding does not look great. What we do not really know in the Overbuild areas is howe much over build there is
The first player into the market is likely to mop up most of the initial demand leaving the crumbs for who comes next
The published accounts are usually pretty high level and do not give much detail
Am unknown at present is how much the conversion to digital will drive up demand. I think it will increase demand but by how much who knows
As the digital conversion progress we may be able to see if as pattern emerges
Given how fast it’s being built for that number to be flat let alone rising is good going, Bob.
How’s the take up in the areas covered in 2021 that 24% number came from now?
To be fair take up figures should only be counted on installations that have been live for 12 months or more.
Could you provide insights into the latest developments or trends in the broadband and telecommunications industry that are covered on ispreview.co.uk?
Telkom University
Clue’s in the name. . . . “They need more cables because they have more . . . ” . . “Yus, my dear”.
I’ll get me coat.
And then with an over-egged competitive corporate culture, and overly robust marketing departments, as demonstrated here, firing on 6 and a half cylinders, . . . they wonder why government’s in firment.
Chaos-mongering marketeers “In-the-frame” for this one and what happened to the “Regulator”?
Neither of those posts make any sense. Are you okay?
No oppression/suppression today thanks milkman.
Of course the politically adroit comment would have been “Why does BrainTree get all the fibre cabling . . . . . FAMILY (In estuarian English)
The whole Fibre installation process resembles another of those Middle Class scams to keep those BM’s and Audis on the driveway and the inflated mortgage paid. Much like NHS COVID vaxs and PPE.
In the first round of distribution of residential digitisation in the 1990s, with the likes the Tele-West and co. you never got this sort of over-building situation. . there was a modicum of control exercised by Local Government and the so-called Regulator. Now all that’s all abandonned . . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS7TX5vMyDQ
What’s that word the corporate bit-twiddlers are so fond of using when it comes to equipment ? . . oh yes “Provisioning” . . . .so Braintree must be “A provisioning too far”.