Scottish business ISP HighNet has launched a new sub-brand called BrawBand, which is aimed at home broadband consumers and will harness Cityfibre’s new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network. But initially its availability will be limited to those covered by the new network in Inverness.
The move isn’t entirely unexpected as it follows last week’s news, which saw Cityfibre confirm HighNet as one of the wholesale partners for their new FTTP broadband network (here). At the time HighNet said it intended to launch consumer services in Inverness, before expansion across other Scottish markets.
Customers can expect to pay from £37.95 per month for an unlimited symmetric speed 200Mbps package (plus £49 as a one-off installation charge) and that rises to £59.95 if you want their top 900Mbps option. Sadly, there’s no phone service (either included or optional), but they do intend to add this in early 2021.
All packages come with a free wireless router, although the top two packages (500Mbps and 900Mbps) also give you parental controls and app-based device bandwidth management. The 900Mbps plan also adds DDoS protection (rare for consumer packages) and a static IP address. Sadly, the packages don’t state what minimum contract term you have to adopt.
UPDATE 3:09pm
The contract terms have now been added and state a period of 24-months.
When checking certain postcodes from Inverness for the areas which got the Cityfibre works carried out about 2-3 months ago – these are now accepting orders via Highnet/BrawBand. Same postcodes checked on Vodafone are not showing any availability at all. Maybe Highnet struck a deal with CityFibre to have primary access to infrastructure in Inverness ? Also Highnet never offered residential products so this is a pretty big change as well.
city fibre partnet with a particular ISP in each area initially. In Milton Keynes where I live it is Vodafone. Some areas its talktalk. However in this case you get a Scottish ISP. Others will follow in a few years I suspect.
Great name, I should say 😀
Hi. I note that our street is conected as work was done in April last year to get cable in. We live along a private track and there is a box at end of track but no availability to the 3 houses, including ours. Is this due to cost of getting into houses as I see others along lanes on our road or also not available yet? Thanks
Sadly there seems to be forced router use, they flat don’t allow 3rd part routers. They also cap you at 1TB & throttle your line if you exceed that. These days anyone streaming at 4k and downloading games from steam or any console provider is going to have a serious issue with that cap, and quickly too at 900Mb/s.
does anyone know which router Highnet supply for their Inverness City Fibre accounts?