ISP Wessex Internet Celebrate 500th Customer in Dorset and Wiltshire UK

Rural Internet provider Wessex Internet (M12 Solutions), which delivers superfast wireless broadband (50Mbps) and some ultrafast (100 – 1000Mbps) fibre optic services to homes and businesses in parts of North Dorset and South West Wiltshire (Southern England), are celebrating today after connecting their 500th subscriber.

The ISP, which has recently been seeing a lot of success, was last month also officially recognised as a true Next Generation Access (NGA) provider through Dorset County Council’s recent open market review.

Unfortunately Wessex Internet were not allowed to bid for Broadband Delivery UK public funding because DCC told them that BT was the only approved provider for that framework (Phase 2 of BDUK was originally supposed to be a bit more flexible than that).

Wessex Internet Statement

With BT being the only potential tenderer, Wessex Internet think it’s going to be more Internet bad news for Dorset’s rural communities, business and domestic. Because the money will primarily be available for cabinet upgrades we know these will focus on villages not yet covered by BT in the first upgrade programme. In a conversation between myself and Pete Bartlett of the Dorset Delivery team we can expect most of this bid to focus on the area of greatest need which is West Dorset.

The good news with DCC’s recognition of Wessex Internet as an NGA provider is that the areas where they have already deployed are now marked as NGA enabled on the local authority maps, which means that public funding with BT can be focused on other areas. Likewise it may help them to secure funding in BDUK’s future Phase 3 stage for fixing the final 5%.