Rural Altnet Broadband ISP Wessex Internet Hits 1,500 Customer Milestone

Alternative network ISP Wessex Internet (M12 Solutions), which has deployed a mix of fibre optic and fixed wireless based broadband services to rural parts of North Dorset, South Wiltshire and East Somerset in England, has upgraded to a new 10Gbps link and attracted 1,500 customers.

At present the network, which covers 129 villages, is a combination of 225km of buried fibre, over 100 Points of Presence (PoPs) on hillsides / tall buildings and it also offers a wireless solution that can connect to properties within a 7.5km line of sight (providing up to 50Mbps of superfast broadband).

The latest growth marks a clear improvement from the 1,000 customers reported in February 2016 and the ISP claims to enjoy a churn of less than 1%, even in the villages where Openreach have since upgraded to fibre cabinets (FTTC / VDSL2). Wessex Internet is now continuing to expand and as such they’ve recently given their network a 10Gbps (Gigabit) boost.

Matthew Skipsey, Wessex Internet’s Technical Director, said:

“The 10Gb upgrade will provide the platform for us to grow. Data inflation is not going away, and so we need the additional capacity to serve this. Technology such as 4K video streaming is not mainstream today, but will be in the next few years. 10Gb will allow us to maintain our premium core network, to never be the bottleneck. It may not be another four years before we’re looking at 40Gb/s and beyond!”

Apparently the upgrade required new routers in the core network to handle the 10Gbps speeds, as well as new fibre providers, plus they’re taking presence in two additional data centres/exchanges as part of the routing of the fibre link from Dorset to London (where the core network connects to the wider Internet).

Securing 10Gbps in rural Dorset has proven to be a challenge due to the scarcity of fibre providers (apart from BT), thus Wessex Internet claims that “innovative ways have been found to create the link between the Wessex network and London” (the ISP didn’t elaborate any further).