Rural ISP TrueSpeed Prep Dedicated 10Gbps Broadband for Homes

Rural full fibre UK ISP TrueSpeed, which is busy rolling out a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of South West England (e.g. Somerset), has today announced somewhat of a first by pledging to offer an Active Ethernet network that delivers a “dedicated” 10Gbps link to every individual customer.

The provider said their new product is different from 10Gbps PON-based networks “where the fibre-optic beam is split between customers on a segment of the network causing contention.“Assuming we’ve read this correctly, TrueSpeed seem to be proposing a product that is almost akin to giving a leased line to ordinary consumers; although these are usually also supported by a business class Service Level Agreement (SLA) and we suspect domestic users won’t see that.

Nevertheless the ISP said they’ve just completed a small “pilot deployment” with the new 10Gbps-capable residential fibre Ethernet switch from Danish vendor DKT A/S and they plan to offer it to residential customers alongside the current 1Gbps box, although the 10Gbps product isn’t expected to officially launch until “later” in 2019.

Truespeed’s “data centre-grade, Active Ethernet network” is already said to be 10Gbps-capable, with all customers already connected to a 10G SFP+ port as standard in every cabinet. This gives them a good advantage over some of their rival ISPs in the full fibre space, which might first need to upgrade the 1Gbps customer-facing ports in their cabinets to support 10Gbps.

Josef Karthauser, CTO of Truespeed, said:

“Our full fibre network was built to be future-proof by design with all customers connected to a 10Gbps-capable port in every cabinet as standard. Offering a 10Gbps box for residential customers was always part of the plan and is a natural next step.

The 10G NTE pilot went perfectly and we are now looking forward to offering residential customers speeds of up to 10Gbps before the end of the year, giving them the ultimate in high-performance, highly reliable full fibre connectivity that will satisfy their bandwidth needs for decades.”

The ISP currently hopes to cover 75,000 premises in parts of rural South West England by 2021 and holds an aspiration of reaching 200,000 by 2025 (this is a demand-led deployment where 30% of a community needs to sign-up). TrueSpeed is being supported in this effort 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 over time (here).

We should point out that one other ISP (Black Fibre) has recently started offering a 10Gbps broadband connection, although at present the only ones lucky enough to receive this have been wealthy owners of some very expensive apartments in the new Manhattan Loft Gardens (Stratford Lofts) skyscraper. Both B4RN and Hyperoptic have also tested 10Gbps broadband connections to homes but neither is officially offering this.. yet.

As usual the catch with 10Gbps, and even 1Gbps for that matter, is with the challenge of actually being able to make use of all that speed and making the service affordable (i.e. many internet servers and even hardware / WiFi will struggle to harness it). A family of four all streaming a 4K video still only need about 100Mbps and many routers/computers only ship with 1Gbps LAN ports, while even so-called multi-Gigabit WiFi often delivers much slower speeds in the real-world (i.e. a few hundred megabits unless you’re sitting directly on top your router).