ISP Jurassic Fibre Begin FTTP Broadband Build in South West

Fibre optic ISP Jurassic Fibre has today announced that they’ve begun construction of their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in Devon UK, which will initially aim to cover various rural communities between Exeter airport and along the A376 corridor to Exmouth.

Assuming all goes well then the first premises will be connected in late November 2019, when the company intends to start its friendly user trial in the area between Exeter Airport, Clyst St Mary and the Sowton Industrial Estate. The longer-term goal is to potentially reach as many as 350,000 premises across Dorset, Devon and Somerset in England.

In order to fuel this effort Jurassic Fibre has raised substantial funds from Fern Trading Ltd, advised by Octopus Investments, to build and operate their “full fibre” network across the South West of England (i.e. potentially investing up to £250m into 3,500km of new fibre over the next 5 years of their roll-out).

In addition to Jurassic Fibre’s team, Hydrotech Water Services UK Ltd, based in Taunton, and Barden Network Engineering, from Honiton, are just two of the local companies now working on the project. Tata Consultancy Services will also be supplying key elements of the software solution for the project.

Michael Maltby, CEO of Jurassic Fibre, said:

“It’s a testament to the Jurassic Fibre team’s experience that we have started to build so quickly. We are confident we will minimise disruption to local communities whilst future-proofing them for the 21st Century with a fast and reliable fibre broadband network. Not surprisingly, we are already receiving lots of interest from people, who are keen to join the free friendly user trial.

Our mission is to connect communities across the region that until now have been unable to access ultrafast broadband. Jurassic Fibre will be taking the Internet experience for families and businesses to a whole new level, with packages offering guaranteed speeds from 50Mbps to 1Gbps.

Buffering and dropouts will become a thing of the past. The new ultrafast network will allow people to be ‘truly digital’ in their day-to-day lives.”

Once the Phase 1 build is complete then JF expects to target other areas including Honiton, Tiverton, Barnstaple, Teignmouth, Taunton, Dorchester, Weymouth and Yeovil. At present the provider has about 40 staff in its ranks and this looks set to double over the next six months.

Mind you they’ll face competition from rival operators, such as Openreach (BT), Gigaclear, Virgin Media, Wessex Internet and others in certain areas. As such JF will broadly seek to target the bits that they’ve missed or left poorly served with slower connectivity.

We were sent some pictures of the street works but they were too low resolution to use and we are thus awaiting better quality versions.