ISP TrueSpeed Bringing Full Fibre Broadband to Peasedown St John

Rural UK full fibre ISP TrueSpeed appears to be in the process of extending their Gigabit broadband capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to the large village of Peasedown St John in Somerset, which is currently home to a population of around 6,500 and would mark one of their biggest areas to date.

The provider’s website states that they’re still in the process of trying to attract 30% of premises in the village to provisionally sign-up (demand-led commercial deployment), although a new Bath Echo report confirms that work has already started with the installation of a new connection box on Wellow Lane.

Apparently the initial focus would involve bringing their fibre optic cable to the local St John’s Community Hall, which could be seen as the first step on the way to reaching out more widely across the rest of the village (provided enough people show their interest). The move also appears to have some support from the B&NES Council’s Community Libraries initiative.

At present much of the village can already access a Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) based service from Openreach, although this tends to deliver significantly slower and less reliable broadband speeds.

Geoff Fenton, VC of Peasedown St John Residents’ Association, said:

“We met up with Neil and the team at TrueSpeed recently to discuss plans to install their internet at St John’s Community Hall.

We’re discussing with TrueSpeed the option of providing a free internet service for any users of the Hall and the Library.”

The provider, which hopes to cover 75,000 premises in parts of rural South West England by 2021 and holds an aspiration of 200,000 by 2025, is currently being fuelled by an investment of £75m from Aviva Investors (here). So far most of their initial deployments have focused upon communities in and around the Chew Valley area but they also have plans to go well beyond that (here).

TrueSpeed’s CEO, Evan Wienburg, recently said: “2019 will be an exciting year for TrueSpeed as we prepare to bring full fibre broadband to many more communities … [I’m] happy to predict that [this year] we’ll spread our wings further and invest more money than ever before into improving the lives of people across the South West.”