Fixed wireless ISP Kijoma Broadband, which serves parts of West Sussex, Portsmouth, the Isle of White, Hampshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Surrey, has informed ISPreview.co.uk that they’ve begun to deploy a major upgrade on their network that will boost capacity and service speeds.
At present the the provider’s top ‘Home Standard‘ package for domestic use offers download speeds of up to 40Mbps (2Mbps uploads) and a 40 GigaByte usage allowance (£1.20 per GB thereafter) for £17.99 inc VAT per month on a 12 month contract. Faster uploads and bigger allowances are possible on their business tariffs.
However, starting in the Midlands of England, Kijoma is now rolling out a new network upgrade (funded entirely by customer revenue) that should enable them to offer “unlimited” usage allowances and to boost their “actual” download speeds to 78Mbps or faster. Apparently some of the first to benefit will be on the Staffordshire and Derbyshire (on the border) side of their network.
Kijoma’s Midlands network primarily covers Tatenhill, Rangemore and Callingwood (also Lancaster park and others in Needwood). On top of that it also covers a large part of Hanbury, part of Anslow and a few rural areas near Rosliston and Caldwell (Derbyshire). The ISP also delivers their service to two major schools at Caldwell and Newton Solney, as well as the Rosliston forestry centre.
The two new services going live there are home and business unlimited broadband with phone (VoIP via Voipfone) included at £24 inc. VAT and £37.20 a month respectively, which gets you an actual download speed of 78Mbps+ (upload is 20Mbps+ for business and 5Mbps+ for home).
A number of the ISP’s customers in the Staffordshire village of Rangemore have already started to trial the service and local independent speedtests suggest that locals are receiving download speeds of around 80-100Mbps, while upload speeds have been hitting 16-47Mbps. Mind you it’s not uncommon for trial networks, where there’s less contention, to deliver better than advertised performance.
As usual we should point out that real-world speedtests can be negatively affected by other external factors, such as the performance of your computer / smartphone or a weak WiFi signal on your home network. In other words, always take such things with a pinch of salt.
One challenge for Kijoma is that, despite their best efforts and submitting coverage data to various Open Market Reviews (e.g. the most recent one in Staffordshire), local authorities tend to shun their fixed wireless network (example). The same happened in Staffordshire and as a result their network is sometimes overbuilt by state aid supported fixed line FTTC and FTTP based broadband deployments from Openreach (BT) and others.
In fairness, overbuilding is a thorny issue with any operator and that’s particularly true of wireless networks where the wide coverage area means that some overbuild is often unavoidable. Similarly not all areas greet wireless networks as optimistically as others, much as we’ve recently seen in North Swindon (here), and politicians aren’t immune to that feeling (even though they’re supposed to now be much more technologically neutral).
Kijoma’s network in Tatenhill and neighbouring Rangemore, which has been present since 2012, is another example of this issue. So far Kijoma has been holding on to their existing customers in such areas and many of them appear to be happy with the service they receive, although it’s obviously a lot harder to add new subscribers when your state aid fuelled competition is deploying into the same patch.
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