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.
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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.
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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“Openreach have already deployed FTTP across many parts of the county.
Not here! I live on the outskirts of Truro, Cornwall’s only city, and the best internet speed I can get from Openreach is 30mbps FTTC on ancient copper wires, combined with multiple frequent dropouts which the Openreach engineer said was due to the cabinet being oversubscribed for FTTC. I’ve been asking for years for them to do something about it and nothing. The government’s rural gigabit voucher scheme doesn’t even consider our location rural enough to qualify for the scheme, and yet the service here is appalling!
Openreach recently announced they are building FTTP without public subsidy in the Truro, Bodmin, Falmouth and Penryn exchanges. Camelford and Liskeard were announced earlier and are underway.
I live close to Exeter in a small village.The best BT internet connection I can get is 7 or 8mps on a good day!Mostly lower and with frequent drop outs despite us using signal boosters inside the house (on recommendation of BT engineer).No plans by BT to extend superfast broadband:frustratingly other close-by villages have it.So much for Govt.promises.
@DM – CDS are there to help you. Have you asked the many other suppliers?
Ive been badgering Wildanet for some months now as I was aware of what they were planning. However Wildanet are bad at keeping potential customers informed and the most I get out of them is “wont be long now”.
So for me atm, its a race between Wildanet and 5G, and by the look of things 5G is going to win.
Located near St Columb Major.
Have you had a CFP quote from Openreach?