ISP Juice Broadband Expands Wireless Coverage in Rural Dorset UK
Poole-based ISP Juice Broadband has once again expanded the coverage of their 50Mbps capable Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) superfast broadband network in Dorset, which has just seen a new mast go live to cover more of the rural Purbeck and Studland areas. They’ve also launched a 300Mbps service for Bournemouth.
The new coverage doesn’t yet appear to be showing on their latest availability map (pictured – ‘blue’ are planned for 2018 and ‘orange’ is live), but it should help to connect people in more isolated coastal parts of the county. Apparently Juice connects to customers using the 5GHz radio spectrum band and they also use both 5GHz and 24GHz links for back-haul, redundancy or where a physical connection is not possible.
So far Juice appears to be focusing most of their efforts upon areas that can show the most demand, such as those missed by Openreach’s (BT) deployment of FTTC or FTTP. For example, the ISP seems set to install new kit to help cater for a small community of around 22 houses on Matchams Close, which due to distance from the cabinet would otherwise struggle to reach much more than 1-5Mbps.
Simon Laraman, Resident of Matchams Close, told ISPreview.co.uk:
“We’re in Hampshire, although serviced by East Dorset council. BT only provides ADSL which gives us speeds under 1mbps. The telephone lines are poor for many properties here. Many residents were under the impression that BT would upgrade the infrastructure. Openreach implies we’re getting fast internet, but it has implied that for over 4yrs. It appears that we’ll need FTTP rather than FTTC which may not be available for many years to come.
Once I explained to residents that the technology is available through Juice Broadband to give us up to 50mbps from £25pcm, many showed interest (a few years ago myself and another neighbour had tried to drum up interest to no avail).”
So far 12 homes on Matchams Close have registered an interest and 4 have returned their contracts (although more have signed direct debits), with installation expected to start within the next few weeks. Residential customers typically pay a one-off £99 connection fee, while rentals start at £25 per month for a 30Mbps (2Mbps upload) wireless broadband service with a 50GB usage cap and this rises to £49 per month for their unlimited 50Mbps (5Mbps upload) package.
Meanwhile the ISP has also recently launched a new 100Mbps to 300Mbps capable symmetrical “ultrafast broadband” service for home workers and businesses in parts of Bournemouth, which appears to mix a fibre optic fed mast with FTTP technology (the description is a little vague). Prices for this start at £98 +vat a month and you can receive FREE installation with a 3 year contract term (or £300 install on 12 month contract).
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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I live in Bournemouth and this is great news but selling 30 Mbps with a 50GB is simply dishonest adverting. It’s simply a ploy so they can have a low ‘FROM PRICE’ on their posters. It would only take 2 hours to reach the 50GB monthly cap, while I understand not all customers are going to download 50GB but customers just checking their emails and visiting websites are not going to notice any different on 5mbit, than 30mbit and therefore it would not make sense for those to switch, unless they tricked into thinking their internet will be faster when in reality its because their WIFI is the problem. I’d rather than 5mbits uncapped than 30mbit with a 50gb cap.
I think its a question of perspective, if you are slurping unlimited bandwidth 24/7 then 50gb might look limited. Where my parents live they are lucky to get 512kbps download. This leaves them with no online TV and limited web access. Their options are 3g, or satellite, and neither seem to give consistent speeds, in addition both would be more expensive than £25 per month for 50gb.
I’m not a BT hater, but BT have had large payments from the government for their broadband rollout, allowing unlimited broadband to be brought down to a price point. These smaller ISP’s are doing the same but other than the basic broadband voucher, receive little funding from the government, but still fill in areas poorly served by BT etc
Sorry but your mistaken, even BT with its funding used to have caps, then it had fair usage policy and then it had throttling then it went unlimited. BT’s 56K dial-up service and many others used to have caps of 1-2 hours online before you got disconnected and then had to reconnect. The only reason BT has unlimited packages is because Ofcom told them they could not advertise their products as Unlimited when they had clause in their terms, it was unfair to the other broadband providers, that were truly unlimited.
In this article, which I suspect is a paid press release due to the fact there is no information on their site regarding 100-300mbit, it says they have 12 homes interested which they get between 1-5mbit, now let’s put an average of 2.5mbit on that, they can physically download 175GB a month, equal to 5GB a day for 30 days, while on the 30mbit connection, you can only download 5GB a day, for a total of 10 days.
The 50GB bandwidth is a joke and a simply ploy to make them appear cheap as others when in reality they are not, also, £100 install fee, that means your paying £33.3 a month, not £25, you can get a Unlimited 4G Data Sim for £27, Matchhams Close is 0.5km away from a 4G LTE mast, so they will easily get good speeds, again, unlimited. Zen Internet got it right, and I wish others would follow suit.
Paid content? I assume from this that you haven’t been visiting ISPreview for very long, as otherwise you’d know that we don’t do that and put a lot of effort into highlighting alternative network providers as well as the mainstream ones (hence why we list 200+ ISPs and not only 6-8 like the commercial sites). As a site we retain independence and editorial impartiality.
Had you taken the time to use the scrollbar then on the first page you would have seen their link to the ultrafast update:
https://www.juice-broadband.com/ultrafast-broadband-landed-bournemouth-2/
Mark Jackson, Don’t see how its possible to be independence and editorial impartiality considering you are engaging in affiliating programs with many Broadband providers, evidence can be found in the 301 redirects.
Evidence can also be found in the site’s terms / privacy policy, where it’s spelled out, and in the many times that I’ve spoken about such things publicly. As well as the clear commercial banners. But these are all externally managed automated advertising programmes (we don’t sell banner space directly anymore etc.) and the advertisers know about our editorial policy.
As I said above, in this case, the evidence for our impartiality is in the site’s 20 years of history and content. In the fact that 95% of the content and listings on ISPreview reflect coverage for providers that aren’t on any affiliate networks and often don’t even advertise. We report on their changes, list them freely and fairly, just the same as any other ISP.. big or small.
Take Juice above, they’re a small altnet ISP like the many we cover, but they don’t do any advertising. We write about them and others in order to help highlight the work they do and because it’s interesting to our readership, but there’s zero commercial relationship involved, it’s just what we do as part of covering this industry. For the first 4-6 years of its life ISPr was funded entirely out of my own pocket, until it became more expensive to run.
If you take the line that a site who has some advertising to fund its costs must therefore be corrupted or not impartial then you’re misunderstanding how the online world works, as well as choosing to believe that every newspaper you’ve ever read is the same.
Hi folks, I can assure you this isn’t paid content. I personally get through more than 110GB of data pcm because of my mobile caps. I use 3 mobile deals (1 with 3, and 2 with EE) to get this.When I go over my contract allowances I have pay for extra data. If there is alot of traffic on the A338 everything slows down and sometimes you lose connection completely. I loaded Tomato firmware onto my router so I can throttle the devices in my house. I have a multitude of devices that are linked to the internet and using Tomato I cap them if they auto detect line speed. So my chromecasts and kids’ tablets can only fire up a youtube video at 360 rather than 1080. It’d be nice not to run my household like a network engineer. My property received 0.25mbps from ADSL. It’s not possible to have a Netflix binge or run a virtualisation over a cloud server with these speeds. Unlimited 4g plans drop out to 3g at some point with traffic controls, normally around the 30-50gb mark. Many of us are interested in Juice’s 50mbps/5mbps unlimited service with free WIDE phone services. So we can dump the landline but still have a home phone number.