London UK FTTH ISP Community Fibre Doubles Broadband Speeds
Alternative network provider Community Fibre, which is currently deploying their Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) network across large swathes of London, has doubled the speed of their ‘Basic’ and ‘Ultrafast’ broadband packages at no extra cost for both new and existing subscribers.
The move means that their £20 per month ‘Basic’ 20Mbps package (1Mbps upload) has now been boosted to 40Mbps, while their £35 per month 100Mbps ‘Ultrafast’ tier has similarly jumped to 200Mbps (both now also offer symmetric speeds). Naturally the ISP’s £50 per month ‘Gigafast’ package remains at 1Gbps because, seriously, there’s virtually zero reason to double that right now.
Jeremy Chelot, CEO Community Fibre, said:
“It’s a great time to join Community Fibre, with increased speeds across our residential and business packages and a fair price structure, we are leading the way across ISP’s. We are very happy in the fact we upgrade all our customers, in and out of contract. With no price rise, no gimmicks, no retention tools, just a fair upgrade to our loyal customers.
This highlights our commitment to bring a faster, better, fairer and more affordable internet to more and more consumers.”
Community Fibre expects to have extended their Gigabit capable FTTH/P broadband network to around 60,000 homes in London by the end of 2018 (mostly council / social housing) and their medium-term aspiration is to reach 500,000 by the end of 2022 (150,000 of which have already been contracted).
Meanwhile the ISP said that for business customers their “speeds have been upgraded and prices restructured“.
| Residential (inc. VAT) |
1000/1000 | £50 |
| 200/200 | £35 | |
| 40/40 | £20 | |
| Business (excl. VAT) | 1000/1000 | £200 |
| 300/300 | £80 | |
| 40/40 | £40 |
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 Linkedin.
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Residential (inc. VAT)
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Openreach should learn from this! 40/10, 80/20, 330/50 is rather boring!
Quite
But wait for the other copperheads to pile in that there is ‘no market’ or ‘demand’ for this product…..
That is obviously proved by all the Alt Nets selling it and now rather a lot of consumers buying it.
At the end of the day dinosaurs become extinct. Even ones that are copper based…..
Nice to see that they’re symmetrical now. 40/40 will be a great boost from 40/1 and the same with 200/200
With these published prices, reliability of fibre and no apparent adoption cost I do not see any likely competition in these communities.
The down and up ratio will be the next topic. It appears FTTP is being introduced with slightly different topologies by each of the providers. It would be interesting to compare their different approaches.
It would not be interesting at all. There in exactly one way to provision symmetric gigabit fiber Internet at lowest cost https://hellosemi.com/hypercube_fiber_optics.html. Not surprisingly this is the only thing you can order if the speeds get into the gbit range from ANY company in the UK. The customer is billed from £30 a month to £85,000 a year depending on who you go to, and depending on how many hoo and haa is crammed into the sales pitch.
XGPON?
That link is absolutely bizarre.
Sorry my assumption was (from my little knowledge) that FTTH usually used a GPON arrangement whereby it was a single fibre with optical splitters to multiple ONUs and that FTTB was a single fibre all the way directly to one ONU. The point I was trying to make very badly was that in future when we are offered full fibre and specified speed whether we would know whether we were getting the former or latter. Community Fibre appear to be offering a full symmetrical Giga speed to residential customers for a very modest cost.
i.e are Community Fibre using the same approach as Gigaclear?
The reason is that we may move towards a period where there will be only one effective full fibre provider in a given geographical area whose coverage may be a higher enough to deter others but not provide a comprehensive enough for the wider community. So some may become “landlocked” with the only solution being FTTC/VM derivatives. In addition where as BT has maintained national price structures we will now experience very localised pricing differences. How each provider approaches distribution in both technology and related ratios (distribution and backhaul) may impact on the pricing in each geographical area..
@Joe – is this your company – https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/11217920
Terrible website, spelling mistakes, makes no sense.
@Meadmodj When I discuss this PON with a big company that installs fiber, his answer is that its not used in UK.
@Meadmodj: This assumption that one service provider will provide one area is not valid. In Sweden you got about 30 per city after deregulation. The key is deregulation. If everything was converted to fiber, the existing ducts would be nearly empty – a few million fibers fit into a pipe about a 2 to 3 meters diameter theoretically and with repeaters now needed about every 10km to 50km depending on SFP modules in use, you can imagine London for example being cabled out with a couple of exchanges and not many big ducts. So there is room for many service providers to own their own fiber – although that would be a bad thing overall. We got VM on one side of the street not allowed to share with BT on the other side. So if 30 service providers enter the same street, are we going to see 30 ducts installed? If ofcom continue they way they manage ducts, sure, we will have 30 🙂 Robust management of ducts should be handed over to an agnostic body that bills each customer according to how much cross sectional area their cables use. Then we can more deregulation and a lot more cheap symmetric low cost fiber Internet.
In Sweden most use municipal dark fibre or rent dark fibre privately, they don’t deploy their own because when there’s dark fibre available that’s absurd.
There is absolutely no way that 30+ operators have their own fibre to premises in a single area in Sweden or anywhere else.
Your thinking that PON is not used in the UK and having to ask people is crazy, information is freely available from official company documents and other sources. VM’s FTTP is PON. Openreach FTTP is PON. CityFibre FTTP is PON. KCom FTTP is PON. A number of altnets use PON.
Point to point fibre is a small minority of FTTP in the UK.
That’s the sort of information I was interested in for all full fibre providers. I doubt if we we get real competition for some years except in the main cities like London. I just wanted to understand the basis of the Altnet pricing structures and why Openreach favour a lower upload ratio when some of these providers are offering symmetrical speeds.
Oh that’s easy enough. Their customers don’t want it. Their customers don’t want it because, for them, leased lines are even more lucrative than for Openreach, and GEA-FTTP risks replacing that sweet, sweet revenue with less profitable broadband alternatives.
I’m not sure why there is no residential hyperfast solution, though. Openreach play it very, very safe with regards to no allowing any of their GEA access networks to congest. They won’t offer above 330/30 on GPON while internationally symmetrical gigabit over it isn’t uncommon and, for the most part, works just fine.
@CarlT has hit the nail on the head.
All that means thought is that OR and its resellers are side stepped by others who are:-
a) much cheaper
b) offer symmetrical services
This also means that the great leased line rip off, that us businesses had to endure, is heading for the sunset in cities at least. Often we were using leased just to get the bandwidth where point to point fibre leased wasn’t really needed at all.