ISP Alncom Extend Wireless and Full Fibre to Rural Durham UK

Rural ISP Alncom has extended their own mix of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) based connectivity in order bring a gigabit-capable broadband network to some remote homes, farms and businesses on the large Raby Estate in County Durham, England.

Until now most of the provider’s deployments have tended to focus on rural parts of their home county, Northumberland, where they most recently completed a 2km long fibre dig to help connect the Matfen and Ingoe area. However the ISP has now begun to build into poorly served parts of Durham too.

The first area in Durham to benefit from this appears to be the large Raby Estate, which is host to a mix of residential homes, commercial businesses and various farms. Sadly quite a few premises in the area struggle to get even 1Mbps of broadband but all that is now starting to change.

According to the Teesdale Mercury, Alncom has now installed a new full fibre connection to serve the local High Force Hotel (Phase One) and Phase Two will look to extend that toward more premises. A fixed wireless solution also appears to have been deployed around part of Upper Teesdale. It’s further noted that some of the network could potentially extend into Shropshire (the Raby Estates straddle both counties).

Stephen Pinchen, MD of Alncom, said:

“We have literally just finished putting it in. We did a joint project with Raby Estates predominantly to connect estate properties and High Force Hotel. The impact was immediate with ultrafast broadband transforming access to the internet for the business and guests. It was our first venture into Durham.

We can do this for a low number of properties. We are unique in that we can connect people with wireless quite quickly and then follow up with fibre when it is viable. We can fill the gaps, so if there are any areas with low broadband, we can connect them very easily.”

The good news is that a big chunk of the deployment costs for all this are being funded by the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, which also makes the service free to install. Prices for their residential unlimited fixed wireless service start at £25 +vat per month for 10Mbps and go up to £45 for 30Mbps, while their “full fibre” packages start at £29.99 inc. VAT for 30Mbps and go up to £69.99 for 100Mbps (we don’t know why they’re advertising home wireless as +vat and full fibre as inc. VAT – all residential products should always be inc. VAT). Separate business packages are also available.