The 4th Utility Aim FTTH Broadband at 150000 New Build UK Homes

A new UK ISP called The 4th Utility (not to be confused with this provider of an identical name), which is targeting the new build homes market (large residential buildings / MDU), has announced that they’ve just connected their first customer to a new Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network and many more will follow.

Initially the provider appears to be targeting around 10,000 customers and they’ve also partnered with Sky TV (SKY Q will be offered to all customers at the checkout when purchasing broadband), as well as FullComms. On top of that they’ve signed deals with several property developers including the Fortis Group, Crest Nicholson, Taylor Wimpe and David Wilson Homes (part of the Barratt Group) among others.

Apparently the Fortis Group are now “pledging to supply all their apartments” with The 4th Utility’s fibre broadband service, while around 1,300 new homes across 6 sites to be built by Crest Nicholson in the West Midlands will benefit and then there’s also another 800 properties via David Wilson Homes. Many more are also on their list.

According to the provider’s CTO, Jimmy Acton, they’ve just “kicked off proceedings” in Manchester as part of another partnership with McGoff at the newly released residential Downtown Development.

Jimmy Acton, CTO of The 4th Utility, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The end to end full fibre solution has a best of breed router already positioned in each home and with an intelligent website ordering process, a new user can order online and be live within less than two minutes from ordering.

The technology built by digital agency FullComms uses APIs to link the hardware to the code; this enables on a successful sign up a wifi password for a property to be emailed instantly to the buyer. The speeds start at 100Mb synchronous and go up too 1Gb synchronous.”

The provider clearly has some big aspirations for itself, with Jimmy confirming that they have a “pipeline of over 150,000 homes to deliver too in the next 5 years.” Sadly there’s no information about the sort of packages and prices they’re offering to residential users on their website.

They also have a retrofit solution and plan to begin rollouts across multiple developments in the UK. However they seem likely to face competition from other more established providers in this field, such as Hyperoptic that has a long history of hooking up large residential apartment blocks.