Wireless ISP Wildanet to Deploy FTTP Broadband in Cornwall

Fixed wireless UK broadband ISP Wildanet, which covers some rural parts of Cornwall in England, has today revealed that they’re looking to branch out into building a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network that would cater for “homes and commercial premises in urban and rural areas” within the county.

The provider is currently being supported by an investment of around £1.15m from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Investment Fund (here), which has been 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).

However, it’s not uncommon for FWA providers to branch out into FTTP, which seems to be Wildanet’s new approach. As part of that plan the operator has already applied for Code Powers from Ofcom, which can help to speed-up the deployment of new fibre optic networks and cut costs by reducing the number of licenses needed for street works to take place.

Wildanet also plans to harness the Government’s gigabit broadband vouchers to help bring their full fibre service to rural areas and they may use Openreach’s Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product to help run some of their own fibre via existing cable ducts and poles.

Apparently their “primary focus will be on the provision of wholesale services, which would enable other telecoms providers to provide retail telephony and ultrafast broadband services.” But this is different from their FWA network, where they’re both the retail ISP and network builder.

The plan is to initially focus upon Cornwall, before branching out into other parts of the south west. One difficulty with this is that Openreach have already deployed FTTP across many parts of the county.