Ecom’s Gigabit Fibre Reaches Tiny Bucks Village of Crafton
Rural UK ISP Ecom, which is busy building a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to rural parts of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, has just connected their first live customer in the tiny hamlet of Crafton (used to be part of the Mentmore estate owned by the Rothschild family).
The community itself sits roughly in the middle of Ecom’s other target deployments in nearby Ledburn, Wingrave (still gathering interest) and Mentmore. Previously the hamlet could only access fixed broadband speeds of sub-1Mbps via Openreach’s copper line network, although a faster fixed wireless network option also existed.
As before, this latest network extension as been achieved with help from the Government’s rural gigabit voucher scheme and Ecom’s own private investment via owner Chris Wilkie. Homes on the new network typically take packages from 300Mbps (£36 inc. VAT per month) and all the way up to 1Gbps (200Mbps upload) for £96 on a 12-month term. Meanwhile installation costs are generally covered by the vouchers.
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The latest deployment also sees the ISP switch from Genexis DRG routers, which has tended to suffer from poor WiFi performance, to the new Icotera i6855. Meanwhile Ecom say they’re also making future plans to potentially reach the villages of Hulcott and Thornborough.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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£36 for a 300M fibre connection, good for them, hope they do well and the service is reliable etc so their customers are loyal. I’d be all over a provider that brought that to my area, Hopefully their customer base remember who could be bothered, and not jump ship for a couple of quid saving when someone else decides to build to them.
I know OR etc cant build everywhere at once its a massive task, but if smaller Alts can and do I hope they get the returns on their investment.
Thanks for your positive feedback, Gary!
Dear Ecom, can you please also look into Penn Street village in Amersham as the people over here badly needs FTTP? The post code is hp70py thanks