Quickline Bring FTTP Broadband to 3 New South Yorkshire UK Villages
Broadband ISP Quickline, which is building a new gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) and fixed wireless (5G FWA) network across rural and semi-rural parts of the North East and Midlands of England, has today named three additional villages in South Yorkshire that have just been connected to their new network.
The latest additions include Finningley, Auckley and Blaxton, which are located close to Doncaster. The new fibre across this area is understood to have reached “more than” 2,000 premises (homes and businesses). Customers will typically pay from £29 per month on a 24-month term for 200Mbps speeds (usually 100Mbps) with free installation, and that goes up to £49 for their top 900Mbps (450Mbps upload) tier. The first 3 months of service are also free.
Quickline is being supported by funding of c.£500m from Northleaf Capital Partners, c.£296.4m of public subsidy from Project Gigabit (here, here and here), £225m in term loans and debt guarantees from the UK Infrastructure Bank (UKIB) and a £25m term loan from NatWest.
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The provider ultimately holds an aspiration to cover around 500,000 premises in rural and semi-rural areas across Northern England and beyond with “ultrafast broadband” – via both FTTP and wireless technologies – “by 2025” (here). Some 200,000 of those rural premises will be tackled by their wireless network, with the other half or more coming from FTTP.
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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So they have £750m (Plus Gigabit subsidy) to cover 500,000 premises. £1500 per premises passed seems rather a lot (unless I’m way off with my calculations).
Given the rural focus for a lot of that build, particularly the full fibre side that may well push beyond the 500k figure once all public/commercial efforts are delivered, then £1,500 is probably about right. Most of the Project Gigabit contracts seem to be around £1,800 per premises passed, due to the rural focus.
However, scaling-up to be able to deliver all this in rural areas tends to be a very difficult thing to get right, much as several other providers (e.g. Gigaclear) have found out in the past.
Well I am in Auckley and am over the moon with the 900/450 service I have had for a little over a week now compared to the dire 20/3 FTTC connection I had previously with BT.
I tried a couple of years ago to get a CFP with Openreach in this area and got quite a way until they pulled the plug on it down to costs ( posted about it in the forum previously )
Given the area of the village I am in is mostly DIG cable I didnt think even Quickline would deploy to here though I was beyond surprised that they started deploying new ducting to this part first. Cannot fault it one bit at the minute