New ISP Fibrecast Brings 100Mbps Broadband to Parts of Dundee City
Residents and businesses in the south side of Dundee City (Scotland), including the City Quay area and Dundee Airport business park, can now access symmetric broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps via a new ISP called Fibrecast. Despite the name it’s actually a wireless provider.
The new network officially launched in January 2016 and most of its coverage currently exists around the south side of Dundee City. All of this is especially relevant because a number of those areas do not currently have access to affordable “fibre broadband” connectivity via fixed lines.
As for the new network, it’s currently using the latest Ubiquiti Airmax AC radios within the unlicensed 5.5-5.725GHz band and the 5.725-5.85 GHz light-licensed band. Fibrecast are also pondering use of the V-Band and E-Band radios to help support future backhaul capacity needs, which may be needed as they expand into new areas.
Meanwhile end user premises, which are often reflective of Multi-Dwelling Units (MDU) and or office blocks, tend to be covered via a single high capacity radio (or fibre optic cable in certain circumstances) and related distribution setup where applicable.
Kieran Paton, Fibrecast Founder, told ISPreview.co.uk:
“Dundee is well known as being a major contributor to the games industry for many years, and much of Dundee has excellent Fibre broadband coverage through BT Openreach and Virgin Media. However for quite a few areas in Dundee (e.g. City Quay complex, most of the industrial parks) there is currently very few Fibre broadband options which has put businesses at a disadvantage to their competitors. Fibrecast has been established with the aim of filling in the gaps of superfast broadband coverage in these areas whilst remaining competitively priced.”
The provider’s website is currently somewhat sparse and they don’t have a coverage map, although we’re told that each enquiry is manually reviewed to classify its feasibility. Firecast’s installation charges, which include an 802.11ac wireless router, are typically around £200 (confirmed after site survey), but this also depends on factors such as the size of the antenna required to receive an adequate signal and the complexity of the installation itself.
In terms of price, Fibrecast only offers a single “unlimited” use 100Mbps option with a 12 month contract at £30 per month for home users (they’re not VAT registered, thus this is the price you pay), or £35 with a 24 month contract for businesses. We note that a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) applies, although at the time of writing we couldn’t find any related Terms and Conditions on their website.
One other thing to be aware of is that the ISP uses a CGNAT (IP address sharing) system by default, although this is set to be removed as part of a future network overhaul and in the meantime it’s still possible to add a dedicated static IP address for an extra +£5 per month.
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 Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Good luck to them, though I suspect they will struggle to reliably deliver those sorts of symmetric speeds on a consistent basis using the 5GHz spectrum (which is getting pretty crowded these days). The fact they are not (yet) VAT registered also suggests to me that it is more of a hobby than anything (I do not mean that in a nasty way, just that they do not come across as a company likely to scale in the short term). You need a lot of £30 per month customers just to pay a single person a reasonable salary – even without the costs of running an ISP.
Agreed. I looked at setting up a WISP in my not-spot area and at £30/month it was pretty hard to get the figures to work even with me injecting several thousand pounds of initial investment and providing a significant amount of free gratis time for first three to five years. Whilst almost all in the local area expressed a desire for a better service (all were unhappy with their less than 2 Mbps ADSL), hardly any were prepared to pay a sustainable price (~£35/Month) for a better service (10 to 15 Mbps).
Good luck to Fibrecast.
13 years for me now,and still hoping the numbers might work one day! 🙂
That’s the thing craski, for a lot of people in the UK price is everything when it comes to a broadband connection with the lowest price being the “best” even if the service is poor/slow.
People will bump their gums but when push comes to shove they won’t do anything about it.
But the whole city pretty much is covered bt fttc or virgin cable 😐