New full fibre ISP Swish Fibre, which was this week acquired by Fern Trading (here) to help unlock an investment of £250m and fuel the roll-out of a 10Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 250,000 UK premises (starting outside London), has today revealed the first 11 locations to benefit.. in Buckinghamshire.
The ink is barely dry on this week’s acquisition by Fern Trading Limited (they’ve also gobbled Jurassic Fibre in the south west of England) and it looks like the first civil engineering work is about to start. A total of 11 locations across the M4 corridor and Chiltern line are now being targeted as part of their initial roll-out plan.
Swish Fibre, which intends to make use of Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts and poles where viable (Physical Infrastructure Access), has previously indicated that they would aim to tackle “underserved towns and villages where broadband availability is poor and there is strong demand for ultrafast broadband services.”
At present most of the initial towns and village locations appear to exist in Buckinghamshire. Apparently further towns within commutable distance of London will be announced later in 2020.
Brice Yharrassarry, CEO of Swish Fibre, said:
“Following the overwhelmingly positive response to our acquisition by Fern we have been asked by several sources where Swish are going to build their first fibre networks. We are currently working on a project to cover over 250,000 properties and the 50,000 announced today represent the first tranche.
Discussions with the County Council and construction partners are well advanced and we plan to break ground as soon as we can in 2020.”
We’re expecting the build itself to begin during Q1 2020.
yay, power to the altnets.
May I please ask: why not this positivity with the Openreach announcements?
They are deploying at a good clip now, which merits praise even if it’s a bit belated.
The economics for Openreach deploying FTTP were very different from B4RN or any other altnet and, as of now, the performance provided via it is adequate for 90% of people.
Very few that can order more than FTTC speeds via Openreach FTTP actually do.
I’m one of a tiny group that might ask ISPs whether they are selling a gigabit next year as those that won’t be are off my list, and this largely because I don’t pay my bill, my employer does.
Gigabit is a vanity tier right now. 330 and even 160 are likewise. For the vast majority of punters 80/20 gives them what they need so even in 2019 Openreach are overbuilding FTTC with FTTP for the future, not the present.
If people were so desperate for speed why, in areas where Openreach doesn’t go above 80/20, do Virgin Media even selling quadruple play and 500 Mb broadband only get 30-40% of the market?
The prices B4RN charge are based around a user base that doesn’t consume that much bandwidth, which you don’t.
The average B4RN user is a lighter user than the average Virgin Media user.
With this in mind it’s possible to be pretty cheap.
What if the punters discover 4k streaming and start using 10+ Mbps each at peak times? How will that pan out and fit into the pricing scheme?
Bet right now they aren’t even touching the sides of 5 Mbps at peak times let alone the values Virgin Media and others are eating up.
id argue that even 1gbps is just enough for a modern gamer
my old fttc 80mbps would take 4-6hrs for downloading games
now i’m on FTTP and it only takes 20mins which is acceptable.
I would expect gamers to play games a lot more than they download them. We could all say x speed isn’t enough based on that 0.1% of our usage
Of course the odd digital hermit that refuses to pay for any content and leeches off Usenet all the time might have different mileage!
Hello job requires
Something doesn’t add up about this, given the investment amount and the company has no active network or annual accounts posted and only formed last year. No fibre in the ground either. It’s like the 250m should be 250k as per their share capital on Companies House.
Well played on being acquired having passed zero premises.
This can’t go on. This has to be heavily consolidated as the cable companies were.
While whomever was posting as FibreBubble posted largely nonsense they have a point with the name.
I’d be intrigued to see the maths on the ROI.
Somebody, somewhere has built a numerical model which backs this investment case up.
But I do agree this seems high for investment in ideas and air.
KCom was totally different as they had real assets and a functional network with subscribers and no major competition.