ISP Lothian Broadband Plans FTTP Rollout to 50,000 Premises

Fixed wireless and full fibre ISP Lothian Broadband, which covers parts of East Lothian and Mid Lothian in rural Scotland, has today announced that they’re planning to accelerate growth through a “large-scale investment in fibre infrastructure” by deploying FTTP to 50,000 homes in communities where they already have a presence.

Until recently the provider was largely still focused on delivering Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) based internet connectivity services to local homes and businesses within their patch, but last year saw them branch out to extend their fledgling deployment of an ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in the East Lothian village of Gifford (here).

As a result, the company’s current “network footprint” extends to 29,000 premises passed in the Lothians and Highlands of Scotland, but most of those have been reached via their FWA network. However, like a lot of other alternative networks (altnets), they’re now increasingly moving to adopt more of a “full fibre” focus.

In keeping with that the ISP has just announced that they intend to target the “fibre gap” in Scotland’s small towns, rural and semi-rural communities, which if all goes to plan will initially see their FTTP network being extended to reach 50,000 homes in communities “where the company already has a presence“.

In preparation for this next phase of growth and after 5-years of guiding the company, founding Chairman Patrick Flockhart is stepping down to be replaced by existing non-executive Director Kevin Hague. Meanwhile Scott Coates will also join the board as a non-executive Director, replacing another of the founding directors, David Walls.

Kevin Hague, Incoming Chairman, said:

“Lothian Broadband has a unique opportunity to target Scotland’s fibre gap with high quality infrastructure bringing much needed connectivity to communities across Scotland. I’m hugely grateful to Patrick for the opportunity to guide Lothian Broadband through what promises to be an exciting phase of the company’s development.

Delivering rapid growth in any business is a challenge, particularly when it comes to managing the culture of the organisation, ensuring systems and processes are scalable and protecting the integrity of the brand. Knowing the quality and ambition of the management team we already have in place, I am confident that Lothian Broadband is well positioned to meet these challenges while taking advantage of the large market opportunity we see before us.”

Sadly, the provider hasn’t yet revealed how much investment they’ve been able to put behind this new rollout plan or how long it will take to complete, but hopefully we’ll get some more details on that in the next few months.

Meanwhile customers of their unlimited rural FTTP network tend to pay from £50 per month for a 100Mbps (symmetric speed) service on an 18-month term, which goes up to £100 if you want 1Gbps. Admittedly that’s not cheap, but such costs are hardly surprising when you consider the high cost of deploying into remote rural communities.