JT Connect 5000 Jersey Customers to its Fibre Optic Broadband Network

JT Global (Jersey Telecom) has confirmed that it’s “well on track” to complete the roll-out of their new 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network by the end of 2016 on Jersey (Channel Islands), which has already connected more than 5,000 premises.

The latest effort forms part of JT’s £41.5m Gigabit Isles initiative, which aims to deploy the new service out to around 42,000 local island homes and businesses (not to mention around 5,000 homes and businesses on Guernsey). Jersey will see the lion’s share of connections with JT’s FTTH network extending out to 35,000 premises upon completion.

Dave Newbold, Gigabit Program Director for JT, said:

“We are really pleased with progress this year, and I would like to take this opportunity to commend my team for their hard work. We are well on track to complete the project on time by the end of 2016. However, we hope to do better than that, and the teams are working hard, and efficiently, to deliver this world-leading project as swiftly as possible.

We know that progress is not as fast as some would like, but we are looking at ways to get through this quicker so that more Islanders can get the benefits of fibre sooner. Once completed Jersey will be one of very few places in the world with fibre broadband connected all the way to the homes of every customer; that network is being put in place so that the Island is ready for the projected escalation in the services and entertainment which Islanders will access over the Internet.”

Most of JT’s existing copper (ADSL) based broadband customers are being offered an upgrade free of charge, although the packages themselves start at £29.99 inc. VAT per month for a 50Mbps (1Mbps uploads) service with an 80GB usage allowance. The top 1Gbps package will set you back £59.99 but oddly it only includes a comparatively small allowance of 100GB (1Gbps could easily eat through that).

JT claims that it’s now “12th place in the world in terms of the scale of its fibre-to-the-home network” because 14% of their customer premises can now connect to the service, although they don’t say which data sources have been used to reach that conclusion.

In any case JT states that the first two phases of its scheme are “nearly complete” and the core network has now been built (i.e. JT has laid 790Km of fibre optic cable out of the project total’s target for 990Km).