ISP Wildanet Claims Liskeard is First in Cornwall for Gigabit Speeds

Fixed wireless broadband ISP Wildanet has extended their network to the market town of Liskeard and claimed that it is now Cornwall’s (England) first location to benefit from the “fastest level of broadband speeds available” at 1Gbps, except its not and the fastest consumer package on their site is only 50Mbps.

The provider itself is currently being supported by an investment of around £1.15m from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Investment Fund (here), which is being harnessed to help build their Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network across rural parts of South West England (mostly Cornwall, but also Devon, Dorset and possibly South Wales in the future).

The latest deployment has just been completed in Liskeard, where locals are now being invited to input their postcode on Wildanet’s website in order to “find out how you could be enjoying broadband speeds up to 900MB” (we think they mean Mbps). Unfortunately the provider’s postcode checker merely throws up one of those “enter your private details to find the answer” style forms.

The announcement also contains no technical details about their “innovative technological solution” for delivering gigabit speeds to locals, which means we can’t judge the merits of it. But if we were to guess then we might assume it to be some sort of fibre optic fed Microwave solution (20-30GHz or 60GHz etc.).

The provider does promise speeds of “up to 1GBps” (again, we think they mean 1Gbps – bits.. not Bytes), but only for bespoke business connections. Meanwhile the fastest package available for consumers on their website is an unlimited 50Mbps (5Mbps upload) plan for £48.95 per month and a standard one-off installation charge of £99 (possibly free when using local grants).

Ian Calvert, CEO of Wildanet, said:

“Gigabit internet is 40 times faster than the average connection, allowing download speeds of up to 1 gigabyte per second – the equivalent of 1,000 megabytes. At Wildanet, we are absolutely delighted to be supporting Liskeard to access this incredible resource, especially at such a crucial time when so many people need fast internet speeds for home-working.”

Once again.. we think they mean “1 gigabit per second,” although quite how they made that gigabyte mistake again (even going so far as to define it with “1,000 megabytes“) after starting the sentence with “gigabit” is beyond us.

Rachel Brooks, Liskeard’s Mayoress, said:

“We’re very excited that Wildanet has chosen Liskeard to install Cornwall’s first gigabit connection. Now, more than ever, people are relying on digital to connect with family and friends but also for business and entertainment, and it’s great that people now have an extra choice that can give them the speeds needed.”

Firstly, congrats to the Mayor for being the only one to consistently say “gigabit” correctly. Except.. it’s not actually “Cornwall’s first gigabit connection.” Ignoring the many multi-Gigabit leased line links that exist, Openreach has also deployed a fairly extensive Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across much of the county and a fair bit of that can do 1Gbps (note: some of it may be hobbled by the ECI 330Mbps limit).

Now this is something that we would have expected Wildanet to know since that same FTTP network covers most of Liskeard. We did check a few postcodes and the best speed being offered by the FTTP ISPs we tried is 300Mbps, which suggests that the local kit hasn’t been fully upgraded yet or the area is affected by the ECI limit. Still it doesn’t seem like the best spot for a wireless ISP to setup camp.

Wildanet’s Other Locations
• Camborne
• Camelford
• Delabole
• Falmouth
• Four Lanes
• Hayle
• Helston
• Lanivet
• Lamanva
• Liskeard
• The Lizard
• Newquay
• Penryn
• Pool
• Redruth
• Roche
• Roseland
• St Moritz
• St Columb Major
• Tintagel
• Wadebridge