Rural ISP Truespeed Appoint Ex-KCOM Man to Build Wholesale

Rural UK full fibre broadband provider Truespeed, which is currently rolling out a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of South West England (e.g. Somerset), has today appointed one of KCOM’s former veterans – Henry West – to join its executive team as Commercial Director.

The ISP, which is being fuelled by an investment of £75m from Aviva Investors (here), currently aims to cover 75,000 premises across parts of rural South West England by 2021 and after that they hold an aspiration of reaching 200,000 by 2025 (i.e. a demand-led deployment where 30% of a community needs to sign-up).

The provider now appears to be beefing up their executive team and as part of that they’ve appointed Henry West to be their Commercial Director, which tasks him with organising the company’s sales strategy and developing plans for a future wholesale offering that will see the firm appoint IT resellers and work with other UK ISPs.

Henry joins Truespeed from business provider FluidOne, where he spent 18 months as Director of Channel Sales. Prior to that he spent 12 years at communications and IT services provider KCOM, most recently as their Head of Channel Sales.

Evan Wienburg, CEO of Truespeed, said:

“It’s great to have Henry on board. As a local Somerset man with an impressive track record in this industry, he is the ideal candidate to supercharge our business offerings and help more businesses in the region get the reliable, ultrafast broadband connectivity they deserve.

Plus his experience in building and growing indirect channels will help us to lay the foundations for our future wholesale play.”

The move into wholesale provision is a fairly common thing for growing fibre networks to do and is a good way to further leverage the new infrastructure they’re building. Sadly though, aside from a few piecemeal announcements, we haven’t had many concrete updates from Truespeed concerning their build progress so far.