Rural Fibre ISP Truespeed Wins Small Business of The Year Award

Full fibre UK ISP Truespeed, which is currently rolling out a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of South West England (e.g. Somerset), last night won the “Small Business of the Year Award” at this year’s annual Bath Business Awards 2019 event.

We don’t know who judges the awards but the website states that “this award will go to a small business which stands out and has had a successful year. Tell us about what your business does, the challenges you have overcome, your achievements and growth and any other matters of significance, with a particular emphasis on the past 12 months. Please include a summary of your financial performance over the past year. Companies entering this category must have an annual turnover of less than £2m or employ fewer than 25 people.”

The ISP currently aims to cover 75,000 premises across 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 on communities in and around the Chew Valley area but they also have plans to go well beyond that over time (here), although we don’t get many rollout updates from the ISP and so it’s hard to know how much progress they’ve made. Nevertheless congratulations are clearly in order.

We note that the provider also happens to be the “headline sponsor” of this year’s event.