Wessex Internet Builds Rural Broadband to 50k UK Premises as Revenues Rise
Rural-focused broadband ISP and alternative network builder Wessex Internet, which is deploying a mix of full fibre (FTTP) and fixed wireless networks across Southern England, has today published their annual accounts to the end of 2024 and highlighted both their “best-in-class” take-up of over 30% and a 20.5% rise in revenues to £5.76m (2023: £4.78m).
The provider, which also holds several state aid backed Project Gigabit build contracts (valued at £72m to deliver full fibre across over 53,000 properties by 2029), currently covers 50,000 premises (Oct 2025) across parts of Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset (inc. 14,000 customers – Aug 2025). Existing deployment plans aim to expand this to 137,000 premises (here).
Overall, the provider’s latest accounts could be said to be healthier or more stable than those of quite a few other altnets we’ve seen recently, and they also make a point of highlighting how they’re “up to date on all delivery milestones that fell during 2024 and to the date of these financial statements“.
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Wessex Internet also describes itself as being “fully funded until 2029” and states that “take-up of our network is best-in-class; exceeding 30% overall and 50% in our most established networks“. We’ve summarised some of their key figures below, although it should be noted that the comparison figures for 2023 actually reflect a 15-month period to the end of December 2023.
Key Figures from Wessex Internet’s Results (Dec 2024)
➤ Revenues increased 20.5% to £5.76m (2023: £4.78m)
➤ Operating loss increased to £7.84m (2023: £5.43m)
➤ Total Homes Passed is listed as 50,000 premises
➤ Total Homes Connected increased by 50% during the year
➤ Gross profit remained fairly stable at £3.62m (2023: £3.68m)
➤ Total fixed assets worth £64.84m (2023: £39.49m)
➤ Net liabilities of -£22.27m (2023: -£10.12m)
➤ Average monthly number of employees (inc. Directors) for the year ended 2024 on 307 (includes a 180 strong construction team), which is up from 213
➤ Network investment increased by £24.7m in the year (2023: £22.6m)
The company currently has a £68m debt facility with no capital repayments under 2029. Some £28.4m of this has already been drawn, leaving £39.6m available.
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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Wessex Internet is one of (if not) the most expensive Altnet int he country.
When they installed to my village they held a meeting in the local school, bragging about how great they are and how responsive and amazing their customer support is.
Be warned anyone thinking of paying their premium prices, you do not get a premium service.
Every night between the hours of 8pm and 10pm their transit links to half the Internet are over loaded. Resulting in constant high pings of 80-100ms. I reported this to them 3 weeks ago, after finally getting through to their script monkeys (I had to switch to their router and run a speedtest.net test for them to escalate anything) the issues disappeared. I had to chase for a follow-up days later as they didn’t get back to me regarding the issue.
They told me:
”
After investigating, we determined that the previous transit link was approaching its maximum capacity, which was impacting performance.
To resolve this, we upgraded one of our transit links.
This enhancement significantly increases capacity and should ensure a more stable and reliable experience moving forward.
Please monitor your service and let us know if you encounter any further issues.”
3 weeks later, the issues are back and their “Amazing support service” once again is ignoring me.
So be warned folks, if you want to upgrade from your reliable 12ms FTTC connection to a brand spanking new FTTP government funded, rip off pricing monopoly AltNet Wessex Internet connection, you can enjoy 80-100ms latency to half the Internet (including Cloudflare and Quad9 DNS services, which makes browsing a lot of fun!)