ISPs iDNET, Cerberus and Trunk Networks Add 900Mbps FTTP
Broadband ISPs iDNET, Cerberus Networks and Trunk Networks (Leetline) have all recently joined the small but growing number of UK internet providers that are now able to offer packages based off Openreach’s (BT) new 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1000Mbps (115Mbps upload) consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) tiers.
The new consumer focused tiers officially launched at wholesale on 23rd March 2020, although Openreach’s decision to pause new FTTP orders due to the COVID-19 crisis (and associated lockdown measures) ultimately resulted in a few ISPs delaying their own launch plans. Nevertheless Giganet (only in Salisbury) and BT did manage to unveil related packages just before the problems started.
BT has the cheapest 1000Mbps tier (900Mbps average speed) so far and is currently charging subscribers just £59.99 per month (plus £9.99 one-off for postage) on a 24 month contract term, although it’s worth noting that their post-contract price for this is still a hefty £73.99 per month.
The good news is that, during a routine ISP database check, we managed to spot three more providers that have adopted the two new consumer FTTP tiers from Openreach. The bad news is that you’ll pay a lot more than BT to get these (smaller ISPs can’t match the economics of scale), but in fairness the new providers are also more business orientated and have a stronger reputation for service quality (most also add static IPs).
UltraFast Extra (500Mbps)
No wireless router
PRICE: £90 per month (£60 one-off connection charge)UltraFast Ultimate (1000Mbps)
No wireless router
PRICE: £150 per month (£60 one-off connection charge)550Mbps
PRICE: £96 per month (£60 one-off connection charge)1000Mbps
PRICE: £144 per month (£60 one-off connection charge)Cerberus FTTP XL2 (450Mbps)
PRICE: £96 per month (£48 one-off connection charge)Cerberus FTTP Ultra2 (900Mbps)
PRICE: £132 per month (£48 one-off connection charge)
As ever you’ll need to be covered by Openreach’s new FTTP network in order to benefit, which is currently available to around 2.6 million UK premises (a very small portion of this are still unable to go faster than 330Mbps), which will rise to 4.5 million by March 2021 and then 20 million sometime after 2025 (assuming the BT Group can find the £12bn needed to do that).
Otherwise we are expecting Openreach to introduce a new discount scheme for FTTP products toward the end of this year (here), which may give ISPs a discount if they’re able to convert a higher % of orders to take their fastest tiers (likely to be of most use to the largest ISPs rather than smaller players).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I didn’t expect BT Consumer to run it as a loss leader so that came in way lower but these prices are about what you’d expect based on BT Wholesale’s pricing.
I await the usual suspects’ complaints due to Openreach-based services being more expensive than CityFibre/Hyperoptic/A N Other alongside refusal to move to FTTP until they equalise.
Unfortunately the same suspects that whine about pricing will no doubt continue to whine. Not just when comparing to altnets either…
VM oomph currently only costs only £79 for 500Mb, 260 TV Channels Talk Anytime phone and calls and a SIM card. The suspects you mention regularly whinge about that relatively speaking bargain price and having to have it as a bundle in every Virgin news item.
I guess we will have to put up with them moaning about BT fibre prices and VM until the race to the bottom for 500Mb and higher services happens and the dregs are satisfied.
Regrettably while we require average speeds advertising this stuff isn’t going to be super cheap.
Gigabit and even 10 gigabit services elsewhere that seem to be too good to be true simply are. They’re either heavily contended locally, on the ISP network or heavily rate limited when they leave it.
Quality costs. Cheap / fast / good – business sense says pick two, and UK regulations require it to be good to be advertised as fast which precludes cheap.
On the Contrary – it’s nice to actually see decent services at sustainable prices!
Currently moving into a house that has 1000/220 Openreach available, hoping Sky/TalkTalk release their plans soon because I don’t particularly want to sign a 24m contract with BT.
Apparently Talktalk are launching fttp in July, and rumours of Sky launching soon too.
Sky already launched their customer pilot (revealed on this very site) and will be ramping that up over the next few months, albeit only on the lowest 160Mbps FTTP tier from Openreach and the 80Mbps one for “superfast”.
@Mark – Do you think it’s likely TalkTalk will release 1Gbps plans as apart of their FTTP Openreach plans?
Hard to say, but if I had to make an educated guess right now then I’d say they’re not yet prepared to handle that across Openreach’s FTTP estate (yet..). But we’ll find out soon enough.
I’m all for using alternative network providers away from the big guys but at those prices that’s over double of BT.
I’m interested to see what Zen’s pricing comes in at when they launch theirs (Note: they are launching but currently no timeframe)
Just got off the phone with Zen, they said by the end of the year apparently is their estimate.
Way to pricey, community fibre or hyperoptic way cheaper for 500mbps or even 1000mbps.
You know what they say millibit brains for millibit speeds with not even a millibit of sense or measure.
It’s proved way too pricey for FTTP 500Mbps. BTWholesale are biggest rip off
Yep VM is giving 500mbps after this month for way cheaper than BTs wholesale… so sad
Guess you won’t be purchasing?
No, gonna wait for VMs 500mbps plan stand-alone next month probably be better and cheaper to be honest.
I know Jordan and it would usually annoy me but I got the top bundle last week so before the article on here – I got it JUST for the 500mbps but the way I see it – I have 2 TV boxes in the quick start pack still. (which can stay there- and if ever used have all the bundles on anyway) but the 550 I am getting + the unlimited sim for me equals the asking price of £79 a month.
When it goes to 600 (which might well be 650 ish too if they do a 675 config?) it’ll be even better value.
Yeah you’re not wrong, but i dont watch TV, and i have unlimited data by three already so its not for me. So buying 500mbps alone is better for me, enjoy the 650 ish speeds 😉
It’s good to see more ISPs offering services, especially on the Openreach network given it has far more availability than City Fibre, Hyperoptic etc. And to those that say it’s too expensive, look to the “value” providers like Vodafone, TalkTalk and Plusnet instead, just bear in mind that contention might impair performance.
Hopefully these announcements will encourage others to enter the market with an even wider range of packages.
Hi Mark – I note you say “smaller ISPs can’t match the economy of scale” – that’s actually a non-factual reason and is just your opinion.
There are many factors on why someone sets pricing the way they do – which may not be just down to the raw connection cost/service, but to simply suggest it’s because smaller providers can’t do it is bogus. We could undercut BT (and indeed some providers do) but our focus is purposely not to play the low price game, but to offer a good value service – we add value elsewhere that our customers clearly value (and indeed people move from BT to us), but that does mean the final sale price is more for us – because to be able to offer the service as a whole at a sustainable price it has to be – but it has nothing to do with our ability to compete on price on a like for like service level if we wanted to.
It’s factual.
Wholesale can and do discount heavily for volume. Their number one customer is BT Consumer.
Operators taking a Tb from Wholesale are going to be paying less per Mbps and per tail than an ISP with a single 1 Gb WMBC link.
Bandwidth costs less per Mb the more you buy, and the same is true as regards routers and switches. A £20k core router is more than ten times as powerful as a £2k one. Businesses that buy a lot of kit from Cisco or whoever get big discounts. Efficient networking and the associated cost is *all* about scale.
I am currently on the 330mb with BT and some reason I am unable to go any faster. I have checked openreach’s online checker and it only gives me max 330mb. Will this change in the future?
This is an old article I’m about to link, so much of it is irrelevant now, as openreach, BTWholesale and many more ISPs now all support 500 and 1000Mbps connections. But the third ‘final’ issue in the article is what you’re facing. It’s due to the OLT (equipment that the other end of your fibre line is connected to) is ECI, and not Huawei. The Huawei kit can do gigabit (I think even 10gbps), but the inferior ECI kit is limited to 330.
Read the article in full for a better picture:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/06/tackling-the-330mbps-speed-limit-in-some-openreach-fttp-areas.html
idnet FTW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
IDNET’s traffic levels are listed as 5-10Gb/s (https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1108) – that’ll be 10 FTTP lines? Sounds like their network is going to get overwhelmed pretty quickly, assuming PeeringDB is up-to-date.
No, it doesn’t work that way. Actual usage is a tiny percentage of the sum of the bandwidth of the connected users. Home users will struggle to saturate their connections over a sustained period, even if they try to do it deliberately.
On peeringdb, the ‘traffic levels’ are just a statement from the ISP. That could be anything – total traffic, expected traffic, peak traffic at the time they filled the form in five years ago… or the current amount of traffic that’s going via transit, once you subtract any already existing private peering links (e.g. direct links to google, netflix, facebook, amazon, akamai, etc, etc).
Certainly, if we look at BT’s Peeringdb record, they state “1 Tbps+” (https://www.peeringdb.com/net/281), but from recent articles about congestion, they state that their peak traffic was 17 Tbps when Amazon streamed a premier league game.
So I’d assume the 5-10Gbit from idnet to be an unreliably small figure.
Yeah, my upgrade options have finally changed with BT now. I only moved to them just before lockdown after getting bored with Sky constantly dragging the FTTP rollout out beyond belief. I could only get 27Mb with them. I did end up with 300Mb @ £44.99 from BT. I’ve never looked back. So I only get The 900Mb option for the £59.99. I might have been sold on the 500Mb tier for a fiver more, but I don’t get that option at the moment. Do new customers? My product is now defunct by BT which makes me wonder does that mean my Halo 1 guarantee of never paying more than a new customer is not valid anymore!? What’s the price point for BT at 500Mb at the moment?
They stopped offering 500 like 2 or 3 weeks ago I think. I believe it was limited time as for me it’s been replaced with 300. Obviously 900 still shows.
They were offering 500Mb instead of 300Mb for a limited time.
The 500Mb tier cannot currently be purchased by new or existing customers.
I just wish there was some way to get fttp in my rural location but it’s proving to be rather difficult to even get information on it. Had a look at the r100 program but as my sync ratio is 13mbs I’m out with the criteria. I just wish someone would turn up and say yes we are doing this.
I notice BT open reach offer very low upload speeds (relatively) on their FTTP products compared to most of the alt-nets who offer symmetric upload/download speeds for similar prices, no doubt BT need to justify their over priced business products and dedicated lines still. The more competition the better IMO, the monopoly of BT needs to end and then they will be forced to improve their prices and service (which is abysmal !!!) or fade away as a company. Its a scandal they have been allowed carry on installing copper for this long and provide such a shocking service IMHO.
@MarkE – monopoly where? Other companies have been able to compete for 30 years.
@The Facts
I think your comment is a little unfair, OK strictly not a monopoly but OpenReach certainly drive (bully) the others out of existence.
Remember the earlier days where OpenReach refused to connect Rutland Telecom until an MP forced them?
An article on this site showed OpenReach used dirty tactics in Deeside resulting in the Altnet packing up and leaving the area.
You DO have to wonder why the likes of some areas get nothing but ADSL and others get Virgin, 5G, Wimax type networks (Swindon), CityFibre and OpenReach FTTP.
This might be great for those areas but this is just anti-competitive for the rest of us.
Also paying 59.99 for FTTP OpenReach yet the equivalent is 35.00 on Hyperoptic, when the latter is faster and symmetrical.
OpenReach are absolutely abusing their dominant position. They are being obstructive to Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and EE as these providers seemingly cannot even service any of the OpenReach FTTP areas yet… Other than best pals BT funnily enough.