London Wireless Broadband ISP Relish Rebrands to Three UK

The inevitable has happened. Fixed wireless broadband ISP Relish, which use to be part of UK Broadband Ltd. until the latter was gobbled up in 2017 by mobile operator Three UK for £250m (here), is being re-branded from 1st April 2019 to reflect the name of its parent – Three Broadband – and their future plans.

Relish Wireless was one of the few Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) providers to adopt 4G based technology (instead of something based off WiFi) in order to deliver faster broadband speeds to individual homes. Most of their network focused on the central London area, but they also helped to serve parts of Swindon and Reading.

However the ISP, which at the last count (in 2017) had around 15,000 subscribers, struggled to deliver on some of their advertised speeds and thus never quite managed to corner the market in the way they would have liked. Despite this their parent company (UK Broadband Ltd.) continued to control a number of attractive licenses in key wireless spectrum bands (e.g. 3.4-3.6GHz and a bit of 3.9GHz, 28GHz and 40GHz).

Mobile operator Three UK saw those bands as an opportunity, specifically a way to build up their spectrum holdings to help support a future 5G network. As a result of their acquisition in 2017, Three ended up with around 144MHz (frequency) of 5G friendly spectrum and have repeatedly spoken of their plans to harness this by deploying a new mobile and fixed wireless “home broadband” service.

At the end of last year the operator further elaborated upon their plans by suggesting that their first 5G network would begin to deploy during the second half of 2019 (here) and could potentially offer “ultrafast broadband” speeds of 100Mbps to homes across the UK (here), alongside the usual mobile (Smartphone) services.

Dave Dyson, CEO of Three UK, said last year:

“We have always led on mobile data and 5G is another game-changer. Also described as wireless fibre, 5G delivers a huge increase in capacity together with ultra-low latency. It opens up new possibilities in home broadband and industrial applications, as well as being able to support the rapid growth in mobile data usage.”

Inevitably this meant that Relish’s brand was destined for the dustbin of history and so it has come to pass. Relish has now confirmed that it will re-brand to “Three Broadband” from 1st April 2019. “We’re re-branding to get ready for the future, a future which is only possible with Three. You’ll still have the same cracking service, price plan, My Account and support you’ve been used to from our lovely Relish team,” said the ISP to customers.

Initially this is just a change of name and there “will be no immediate changes” to either the service, billing or network (coverage is the same), but eventually the new brand name will be used as a launch pad for Three’s 5G based ultrafast home broadband. Likewise this does not at present have any impact upon existing customers of Three’s own mobile plans (fixed wireless and mobile networks tend to be configured separately anyway).

At the time of writing Three aren’t saying anything more but this is one to watch. Three have made no secret of their ambitions in this area and we’ll be watching closely to see how much of that comes to fruition and what impact it has on the wider market. In any case 5G will take several years to deploy and a lot of existing capacity feeds will need to be upgraded in order to make the most of it.

In the meantime Relish continues to offer average speeds of 20Mbps with unlimited usage from just £22 per month.