County Broadband Preps Rural Full Fibre Rollout Plan for Norfolk UK UPDATE

Alternative network ISP County Broadband, which last year secured an investment of £46m to help it roll-out a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, claims to have identified 20 rural villages in South Norfolk and Breckland where they could extend their network in the near future.

The operator has already begun their deployment around several rural communities in Essex (here), where they’ve tended to focus on areas that suffer from slower ADSL or FTTC (VDSL2) speeds due to the presence of longer copper lines on Openreach’s (BT) network. By the looks of it they’re also now extending their plans to include parts of rural South Norfolk.

At this stage the provider appears to be keeping the exact details of their rollout close to their chests, although a report on EDP24 suggests that the communities are all in the Diss and Thetford areas which does narrow the likely target list down quite a bit (a number of village information meetings are said to be planned for later this summer).

The ISP operates a demand-led ultrafast broadband network, which means they’ll only go into communities where 30% of local premises have expressed an interest in taking the service. Assuming all goes to plan then County Broadband hopes to eventually cover 30,000 premises in poorly served areas across the East of England region.

Lloyd Felton, CEO of County Broadband, said:

“We are very excited to announce our first full-fibre rollout plans in Norfolk to help transform the county’s digital landscape and rural economies. Our investment in Norfolk’s infrastructure will not only make many forgotten villages fit for the future but will also place them in the top seven per cent for UK digital connectivity.”

Prices for the new service start at £39.99 inc. VAT per month for an unlimited symmetrical 30Mbps package on a 24 month contract term and rise to £74.99 for the top 1000Mbps tier.

UPDATE 1:07pm

Interestingly it appears as if CB has chosen to use different pricing for Norfolk vs their initial rollout in Essex. The ISP informs that prices for Norfolk actually start at £20 per month for 300Mbps and £27.50 for 600Mbps (terms apply), although we can’t check this as they’ve yet to announce a detailed rollout plan.