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Superfast Wireless Broadband from Relish Goes Live in Southwark UPDATE

Wednesday, Feb 7th, 2018 (8:13 am) - Score 3,667

Long suffering residents of the SE16 area (e.g. Rotherhithe), inside the central London borough of Southwark, are starting to get access to faster broadband connections. This comes after local ISP Relish Wireless (UK Broadband Ltd.) began installing the first of several new masts (aerials).

Overall London already has very good coverage of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) capable networks, which should be available to around 97% of premises. Sadly this isn’t true for every borough in the city and Southwark has long been known to be one of the weaker areas for such services (around 92% coverage). The large number of Exchange Only Lines (EOL), which are particularly expensive to tackle, doesn’t help.

Toward the end of last year the Southwark Council finally moved to address this by setting out a new digital strategy (here). As part of that plan the council confirmed that they were signing a number of lease agreements, which would enable operators to install “wireless broadband infrastructure on a number of council owned buildings [that] will supply up to 40Mb broadband speeds across 70% of the borough.”

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The operators’ concerned were UK Broadband Ltd. (they’re now owned by Three UK and also run local ISP Relish Wireless) and Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Ltd (CTIL). The latter is the company responsible for managing O2 and Vodafone’s UK mobile network(s).

In all, 26 new UKB installations, including 4 in the Rotherhithe area, and 13 new CTIL sites were planned, bringing the total number of UKB and CTIL installations on council owned assets to 28 and 25 respectively. With the exception of 3 installations, all new wireless telecommunications aerials will be hosted on the rooftops of residential housing blocks.

The good news is that UKB has recently begun to deploy these, with the first one going live at a site on Swan Road. The Rotherhithe sites are among the first to be installed and deployment should be completed before Easter, while the unrelated CTIL sites are still expected to be completed by the end of Spring 2018.

A few people have already connected to the service and are reporting significantly faster speeds than their old fixed line ADSL connections via Openreach (BT) based ISPs, which is good since Relish Wireless sometimes struggles in the speed and connection stability department (location dependent).

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Customers typically pay from £22 inc. VAT per month for Relish’s ‘up to’ 40Mbps service with unlimited usage (this price recently increased by +£2), which includes a free wireless router on the 12 month term or a £70 one-off charge for those taking out a 1 month contract. Relish uses a fixed wireless form of 4G (LTE) technology in the 3.5GHz to 3.6GHz bands.

The council hopes that the income generated from these new lease agreements, plus the uplift in rents received for existing UKB and CTIL sites, should represent a “significant revenue source … over the next 15 years.” The first year of income is expected to be about £200,000 and this will help to fund the delivery of the council’s new Digital Infrastructure Strategy. Credits to Alloneword for the spot.

UPDATE 9th Feb 2018

Relish has confirmed that they’ve also expanded their network into parts of Wandsworth and Lambeth.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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2 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo Moses Jonson says:

    Interesting to see local London ISPs trying to get people connected by fibre for people in boroughs that suffer from old copper wires that deliver slow speeds to consumers (in London). But overall London has great Superfast/ Ultrafast internet connection in general.

    1. Avatar photo Rahul says:

      This is not really Fibre broadband! I have tried Relish myself 2 years ago. A complete and utter flop of a service! This is a Wi-Fi service where you have to have either a wireless Wi-Fi antenna usually connected in the balcony. Because there is very poor signal reception from in doors.

      Now the problem with this service is that you don’t get the 40Mbps that Relish promises you. Nor can you catch the Relish Wi-Fi signal with their router staying in doors (maybe not in my E1 area at least) with my highrise apartment. I have tried a 1 month contract and it completely failed to achieve more than 5-6 Mbps at best.

      Not to mention there is wind and the antenna shakes the connection drops out because any vibration of the antenna will cause signal to be affected unless you have clean full 4 green bars of signal strength which in my area I don’t get more than 2 orange bars. Yet Relish claimed it was supported in my area, after signing up I only realised they were basically lying to get subscribers.

      This is a very bad service. I have tried the O2 free Wi-fi service that they have recently deployed in the City of London and that has better coverage. I have had around 27Mbps with O2 speedtest. But the problem with that service is again, antenna needs to stick out of my balcony any wind and signal drops the connection and it only has a 10GB monthly usage allowance totally futile for more than basic usage. But still better than Relish and can deliver up to 150Mbps if you are right close to the hotspot (normally outside of your home). But not a practical solution as the wireless hotspot even if it is installed on the building when you have the wireless router inside your apartment the signal degrades, particularly when you have a highrise apartment. The signal will be even worse.

      The reviews speak for themselves! https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www1.relish.net
      Excellent 38%
      Great 17%
      Average 11%
      Poor 9%
      Bad 24%

      Only 38% say it’s great and 24% say it’s bad. You don’t get these kind of negative reviews even with the worst Copper Broadband services with the exception of TalkTalk.

      The reality is that if such Wireless services like Relish were a success, nobody would be thinking about Fibre broadband. Even FTTC would be a far superior service to Relish or the O2 free Wi-Fi service.

      Fortunately for Southwark residents, there are quite a few buildings already supported with Hyperoptic and other buildings have agreements granted and are on the verge of being supported soon.

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