FTTH ISP Community Fibre Confirm SDU House Trial in London
Gigabit-capable UK broadband ISP Community Fibre, which aims to bring their “full fibre” network to more than 500,000 premises (mostly social housing) across London by 2022, has confirmed that they could expand beyond big apartment blocks (MDU) and are conducting a Single Dwelling Unit (SDU) trial with individual houses.
At this stage the Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) developer is still primarily focused upon deploying to MDUs, which are relatively quick and inexpensive to tackle in urban areas. In keeping with that CF’s Chief Operating Officer, Neil Heffernan, confirmed to us that they are still on target to “pass 100,000 properties by end of the year” (we think they’re now running at around 8,000 premises per month).
Going forward the ISP has previously suggested (here) that it might eventually be possible to cover more than 1 million UK premises with 10Gbps capable broadband by 2025. However that may require them to expand into other UK cities and to possibly also start tackling individual housing (SDU); the latter tends to be much slower and more expensive to reach.
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Neil was kind enough to confirm that CF have now launched an SDU trial, although we’re not confident enough to say we know exactly where this is taking place and CF have not yet confirmed the location to us. Nevertheless this is a promising development and we think they may just have beaten Hyperoptic, which has a similar focus and plans, to the punch.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Hopefully the trial is a success – Hyperoptic did a trial in early 2018 in the Greenland Dock area in London SE16 which in Brunswick Quay is around 200 properties consisting of houses and flats – unfortunately a few months later they cancelled all the orders round about the same time they announced they did a deal with Southwark council to supply all the council properties – Hyperoptic said they had unspecified problems during the trial and also had problems buying bandwidth to cover the area – no doubt all the available bandwidth is going to the council properties and the new builds.