Pine Media Extend FTTP Broadband into Rural Derbyshire UK

UK ISP Pine Media, which recently revealed that the roll-out of their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network will be extended to cover 50,000 premises in the city of Sheffield (here), has revealed that they’re now going to extend this into rural parts of South Yorkshire and neighbouring Derbyshire.

Until now Pine’s “full fibre” build has been largely focused upon urban areas, particularly large apartment and office blocks, but the provider has now revealed that they’ve this week started to build into the rural Hope Valley area. As part of this they’re also intending to make some use of Openreach’s rival FTTP network and products, but they’ve yet to launch those (this is imminent).

By combining their build with the coverage being created by Openreach they hope to cover an additional 1,800 premises in locations such as Beauchief, Edale, Greenhill, Grindleford, Hathersage, Hope Valley and Woodseats (i.e. 600 premises will be covered by Pine on the edge of Openreach’s nearby FTTP build).

Pine Media’s MD, William Dear, confirmed to ISPreview.co.uk that their part of this rural build should be completed by around the middle of October 2020. William also noted that they have run their fibre into BT’s local exchanges using Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) and the related GEA cable links (data capacity) for their separate Openreach based broadband products should go live next week.

As we understand it the ISP will initially attempt to streamline their rural packages between the two different underlying FTTP networks, although businesses within their own side of the coverage will still be able to access a symmetric 1Gbps tier (Openreach can’t yet offer that via FTTP). On top of that Pine also has plans for a larger rural deployment of their own fibre around more of Sheffield, which should be revealed soon.

Outside of that the ISP currently charges from £25 per month for a symmetric 100Mbps FTTP package on their own network and this goes up to £65 for 1000Mbps on a 12-month term (installation is free on some packages, but £60 on others). In other areas, covered by Openreach’s FTTP, they will offer packages from £28 for 36Mbps (10Mbps upload) and that goes up to £50 for 500Mbps (73Mbps upload) with an 18-month term and £20 one-off for installation.