Full Fibre ISP TrueSpeed Snatch Virgin Media UK’s Ex-Head of Build

Rural full fibre ISP TrueSpeed, which is rolling out a new Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of South West England and aims to cover 75,000 premises by 2021, has appointed Virgin Media’s former Head of Build on Project Lightning – Simon Wall – to be its new Director of Operations.

Simon obviously has extensive broadband build experience, not least as a result of his decade-long tenure at Virgin Media. Prior to that he lead various functions at Telewest and Virgin Media including partner/contractor management, field operations, data services, headend and demand management.

Suffice to say that TrueSpeed hopes their new Director will be able to help “accelerate the deployment” of their Active Ethernet 10Gbps-capable network delivery programme.

Evan Wienburg, CEO of Truespeed, said:

“Simon’s broadband build pedigree is outstanding and I am delighted to welcome him to the team as we accelerate our network build across hard-to-connect parts of the south west. Simon’s expertise and proven track record in network delivery and partner/contract management will be invaluable to Truespeed and the region as we bring the south west into the digital fast lane.”

Simon Wall said:

“As a nimble and ground-breaking broadband infrastructure provider making waves across the rural south west, Truespeed is perfectly placed to support the growing demand from businesses and households in harder to connect areas for fast, reliable, full fibre broadband services that will last for generations. Ensuring our engineering team is on point to roll out our network to customers as quickly as possible will be top of my to do list.”

TrueSpeed is currently being supported by an investment of £75m from Aviva Investors (here). So far their initial deployments have tended to focus upon communities in and around the Chew Valley area of Somerset.