Welsh ISP Spectrum Internet Claims First Gigabit Fibre Building in Cardiff

Cardiff-based Spectrum Internet has become one of the first UK ISPs to demonstrate how the government’s £150m Urban Broadband Fund (UBF), specifically its Broadband Connection Vouchers scheme, can be used by several businesses to “collectively pool their funding together” for the roll-out of a fibre optic based 1 Gigabit capable connection.

The voucher scheme allows individual businesses in selected UK cities to apply for grants worth up to £3,000 in order to gain access to a superfast broadband (30Mbps+) connection. But the scheme also supports aggregated bids by several firms, which could potentially help to afford a generally better connection than they might otherwise have received when bidding individually.

In this case 14 businesses in The Maltings, a grade II listed building in the city-centre, clubbed together and submitted a collective “Super-Connected Cities” funding application for cash that enabled Spectrum Internet to make their 1Gbps Ethernet (1000 Megabits per second) connection available to the property and its various tenants.

Gareth Oram, Office Manager of the The Maltings, said:

“We’ve had a recent £3m refurbishment which means The Maltings now offers high tech luxury Self-Managed and Fully Serviced offices that will now benefit from super-fast broadband.

The new Gigabit service that Spectrum Internet has installed has future-proofed the building which is resulting in huge efficiencies for our tenants. This service not only completes our offering of providing ultra-modern services in a 19th century setting but is also generating increased interest from prospective tenants.”

Spectrum Internet, which claims to be helping a number of other businesses in the city with similar UBF / SCC applications, added that its effort had “delivered the first ‘Gigabit’ building in Cardiff“.

It should be said that rival leased line services of a similar and faster performance are theoretically available to businesses in Cardiff, although we don’t have any uptake figures to confirm Spectrum’s claim. Never the less it’s probably safer for Spectrum to claim a first under the voucher scheme instead of generally.

In an ideal world this pooling of bids could also be used to connect up other business areas/buildings in a way that might indirectly bring faster connectivity to digitally isolated home users too, which is technically supported by the voucher scheme, although we’ve yet to see any examples of this happening as part of the UBF.