JT Connect 7600 Subscribers to its Jersey Fibre Optic Broadband Network

A recent update from JT Global (Jersey Telecom) has revealed that 7,600 customers have now subscribed to the operators 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network on Jersey (Channel Islands), which is being rolled out to around 42,000 premises by the end of 2016 (plus 5,000 on Guernsey).

The £41.5m Gigabit Isles project to install a new island-wide fibre network technically began in 2011 and once complete it will have deployed around 990km of new fibre optic cable to replace the islands old copper lines and slower ADSL services. JT intends to remove “all copper services” by the end of December 2014 (here).

At the last count, in October 2013 (here), JT had managed to lay 790km of cable and connect more than 5,000 homes and businesses. The most recent figure puts the total cable deployed at 879km, which means they’re getting close to the goal (note: the shorter individual home connections are often the most time consuming to install).

Dave Newbold, Gigabit Director for JT, said:

“Building a fibre broadband network for all customers in Jersey is a once-in-a-generation project, and will take five years, completing as planned in 2016. We began in 2012 with the areas of the island that needed the most improvement in broadband speeds. Also, since this project involves laying cables under roads, and then connecting them to every single broadband customer in Jersey, it is complex; so we needed to refine our process before moving into town, where the chance of causing undue disruption was at highest.”

It’s understood that the project has also recently started branching out to connect a group of selected business customers in St Helier before the end of 2014, which had previously not been due for a connection until later in the deployment. Overall JT states that around a quarter of their customers are now connected to the new fibre broadband network.

JT’s fibre broadband packages typically start at £29.99 inc. VAT per month for a 50Mbps (1Mbps uploads) service with an 80GB usage allowance and their top 1Gbps package will set you back £59.99, but this only includes a comparatively small allowance of 100GB (1Gbps could easily eat through that).