ISP Exascale Extend Rollout of FTTP Broadband in Shropshire UK

UK ISP Exascale, which last year began to build a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to cover premises in the Shropshire borough of Telford and Wrekin (here), has today confirmed the next set of locations to benefit from their on-going deployment.

At present the operator has already completed their Phase One roll-out to the Hadley area of Telford, which also harnessed a fair few of Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts and poles (PIA – Physical Infrastructure Access) in order to run their own optical fibre cable. Since then they’ve started building into their Phase 2 locations (more of Hadley, Trenchlock etc.) and have so far covered 500 premises.

Suffice to say that Exascale has learnt a lot from their initial build and in response they’ve partnered with a local civils engineering company GN Groundworks, as well as Telford-based Advanced Building Composites (supplying the project with prefabricated chambers/man holes etc.), to help ramp-up their deployment with less use of PIA.

The ISP officially kicked-off their new civil engineering scheme this week and the new route will see them pass over 5,200 premises (200 businesses and over 5,000 homes) via kilometres of brand-new telecommunications ducts and chambers. The areas being targeted for this over the next 6-12 months include Hortonwood, Apley, Leegomery and Shawbirch (Shawbirch is technically their first village).

Thomas Bibb, CEO of Exascale, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“As Exascale continues to grow from strength to strength, we will work with the local community, Telford and Wrekin Council and our partners to deliver a Gigabit Full Fibre Telford. Putting Telford on the map as a Tech Hub, leading innovation and creating highly skilled jobs.”

The provider is taking the cool and calm approach to deployment under their “Gigabit Telford” project, learning as they go and then feeding that experience back into future plans as they gradually ramp-up. So far this appears to be working well and they’ve previously also hinted at future plans to expand into parts of both Wolverhampton (West Midlands) and Cheltenham (Gloucestershire).

At present new customers can choose packages that start from £32 per month for an unlimited 80Mbps (20Mbps upload) service and that goes up to £75 for their top symmetric speed 900Mbps (average) tier, which currently includes free activation and a Tenda Mesh WiFi router on an 18-month minimum contract term.