Wireless ISP Quickline Acquires UK Rural Broadband Rival JHCS
Fixed wireless access ISP Quickline (Bigblu) looks set to improve their UK rural broadband network coverage to premises (homes and businesses) across parts of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, which will be achieved by gobbling rival provider JHCS for an undisclosed sum.
At present Quickline already has a network that can deliver “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) speeds or faster to homes in some parts of Lincolnshire, among other areas (or up to 100Mbps for businesses). Similarly the network operated by JHCS can deliver download speeds of up to 50Mbps (5Mbps upload) to various other parts of the same county and usually for similar prices (JHCS is probably just a little cheaper overall).
Quickline said that purchasing JHCS, which has a strong focus on connecting remote rural communities in the two counties, is the next “logical step” in their on-going effort to reach into similar areas and to expand the overall coverage of their network. Under the deal the ISP will take over management of JHCS’s existing network “without any disruption to the service.”
Hayley Silvester, Head of Sales at Quickline, says:
“We’re thrilled to take on JHCS’s customer base, as we’re confident that we can continue to provide them with exceptional broadband as well as many other connectivity solutions. We use a combination of technologies to bring superfast internet to the most secluded areas whilst offering highly affordable monthly plans.
All existing JHCS customers don’t need to worry about a thing, as their accounts will transfer over to us without any disturbance or stress. We’d like to take this opportunity to welcome them to Quickline – we look forward to providing an unrivalled connectivity solution and the best customer service around.”
The fact that the two services already operate using quite similar packages and prices should help to smooth the transition.
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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lol, 30mbps… i dont get why its so low… you can deliver 200+mbps up n down quiet easily wirelessly, 400+ mbps on dual wan balanced into one connection.
seems like min speed max profits…
Now try that in point-to-multi-point and at busy periods of the day and with all of the other wifi crud out there raising the noise floor… 🙂
That would be ptmp obviously, if it were ptp it would be 1gbps+ but thats alot of wasted tower space and an eyesore lol.
Doubt the floor noise would make much impact regardless of time of day, especially with everything on 24/7 nowadays. It dont make if much difference for my setup.
i run 4 Aps (360 coverage) (on my roof) to 17 mates so we can all game on the pc locally (wlan) with ubiquiti gear.
Only 1 mate gets 180mbps ( due to poor los – shes 12km away) the rest 200mb+ with a ping of 8ms – 12ms, which is far quicker than any of our internet connections weve got at home.
Wow Joe, that’s pretty impressive. Which Ubiquiti bits do you use as a matter of interest, We have some of their kit in our network but only for ptp links. All our ptmp kit is Mikrotik which although not the best from a wireless point of view has huge other advantages due to the power and flexibility of RouterOS.
Well we use the nanobeams AC for cpe end £80 each, (450mbps+ ptp) & ( i believe they are in the process of being replaced, typical)
We have recently invested in upgrading the 4 Aps with prisim stations AC. (before we used old sector antennas, but these prisim stations are like night and day compared to the old gear) antennas are interchangeable also, given a narrow beam path. which helps with interference etc.
switch side of things, The aps are hooked upto a unifi switch US-24-500W, basically for the simplicity and for plans down the road. ( they were hooked upto a netgear gs724t switch, which ironically is faster than the ubiquiti switch lol.
Our next plans are to look at using a Nanoswitch ( powered by poe, 4gbps line rate) at the Cpe end, to run 2 wan connections ( wan balanced by router, ) all bridged of course, (so about £260 per household )and if we brave it, we might swop the Aps to something else and get a leased line installed at my house, and possibly might even venture into the ISP land, but that will factor on alot of things first.
Ermm for your instances of PTP, maybe try looking at the ubiquiti AF-5XHD, 1.3Gbps of actual thoughput, 2million pps, Roughly £450, have them in a NXN config ( AF‑MPx8 ), you can have anywhere from 2gbps+ on a ptp link with 4 devices, 2 acting as redundancy.. I also believe the af-5xhd will come with 2 x 1gb ports , allowing you to use them independently. Oh and its also in the works of becoming a ptmp device.. atm its soley for ptp – backhaul..
Very interesting, thanks.
We did experiment with a Ubiquiti/Mikrotik mix quite a few years ago, but had issues over Ethernet port “compatibility” (best way to describe it, though never got to the bottom of it, as the devices would just stop passing traffic until a reboot, then ok for a while, then needed another reboot…).
I have occasionally wondered about trying again, as Ubiquiti does seem to have a better wireless reputation (especially wrt throughput), but as with all change it is risky in case you find you need to reverse back for some (odd) reason. Might well give it another go in the not to distant future. We could start on one of the nodes/APs we only have a few customers on to see how that goes. When it is customers rather than friends, you have to tread a lot more carefully over such things! 🙂
We are also, at the moment, trying out some Mikrotik 60 GHz stuff, with the aim of getting some customers off 5GHz due to the “noise” (we have lots of APs out there, and more and more customer wifi routers have 5 GHz enabled and operating in the bands we use).
Thanks again for your info.
Still much better than ADSL max down a long line