ISP County Broadband Sees Demand for Rural UK FTTH Network

UK ISP County Broadband, which last year raised £46m to support the rollout of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the rural East of England region, has revealed that so far 10,000 homes and businesses across Essex and Norfolk have pledged an interest to get the service installed in their village.

The provider has already begun their demand-led (i.e. requires interest from 30% of premises in each community) rollout around rural Essex (here), as well as the Diss and Thetford areas of South West Norfolk, although they also expect to reach into parts of Cambridgeshire.

At present around 50 villages are in their initial build plan until Q2 2020 (reaching c.15,000 total homes passed) and the latest aim is to cover a total of 40,000 premises by the end of 2020. Most of their initial villages are in the Colchester, Chelmsford and Braintree areas.

Overall premises in a total of 148 villages have registered to receive CB’s new network and that’s where the figure of 10,000 has come from. Just to be clear, this is NOT premises passed or connections, in most cases the network build has not even started yet and the village itself will need to hit the aforementioned 30% mark before it gets put on their roll-out plan.

James Salmon, Head of Sales at County Broadband, said:

“We’ve very excited to reach this important milestone and it’s clear there is a huge appetite for Hyperfast broadband speeds in rural Essex and across the region. We live in an increasingly data hungry world of ultra-high definition streaming and online services but current superfast connections have been a sticky-plaster solution.

The newly elected government is pushing for all of us to have access to gigabit capable speeds and we share this ambition. We believe our new hyperfast full-fibre networks will have a significant impact on not just local residents but businesses, communities and the wider economy.”

Otherwise homes and businesses in the villages of Eight Ash Green, Dale Close and Stanway near Colchester are expected to be connected in January 2020.