Barnet Council in London Begins New Gigabit Broadband Rollout
The Barnet Council, which acts as a landlord for nearly 14,000 properties in the London Borough, have announced that work has now started to connect the first 1,000 council homes to their new “borough-wide gigabit broadband network” project in Colindale’s Grahame Park estate.
The gigabit fibre pilot scheme forms part of Barnet Council’s wider plan to bring such speeds to all of their properties by 2023, which will be conducted with the support of several different operators. But initially the rollout in Grahame Park is being done by UK ISP CommunityFibre.
Installation of the new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) pilot will start this month and is due to complete by around mid-March.
Cllr Dan Thomas, Leader of Barnet Council, said:
“Installing a new gigabit speed fibre broadband service is an important part of our regeneration plans for Grahame Park. The COVID-19 crisis has led to many of us relying more on the internet to work remotely and home school, as well as keeping in touch with our friends and loved ones.
We know existing broadband networks are straining to keep up with today’s demands. This highspeed broadband service will offer our residents in Grahame Park access to the internet that will make it easier for the whole household to work, educate and stay connected.”
The deployment will also support CommunityFibre’s plan to cover 1 million UK homes and businesses (mostly in London) with their gigabit speed network by the end of 2023, which is being supported by around £500m of private investment (here).
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 and Linkedin.
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Community Fibre are also exceptionally busy in Brent. I’m on a private estate and they are rolling very quickly using Openreach’s PIA product.
The move to Graham Park is good – it currently has poor connectivity.
Fingers Crossed it rapidly expands to Saracens area. There is a fair amount of VM coverage as well around the area but around Saracens is a bit of a dead spot. Can see that Community Fibre already has some presence in Grahame Park.
It is amazing it has taken Barnet this long. Well I am not really knowing how disorganised they are.
Wandsworth did the same a long time ago: 2015…….
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7149-savona-estate-in-north-battersea-leading-gigabit-charge-for-wandsworth
It costs the Council nothing and actually makes the premises more valuable as they have better connectivity…..
I’ll correct myself it all kicked off in 2012
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5557-wa-s
8-9 years is a long time for Barnet to slumber and argue itself round in circles.
Anyone know if CM will come to palmers green area to? Or no im with Enfield council so i dont know.
Try asking your councillor if Enfield is doing any kind of tie up with any of the ISP’s
It is the kind of thing that is low effort for the council to do and has a big upside for residents.
Anyone know when there will be a rollout in Ealing, or if FTTP can be installed privately, I’d be very much interested
Let me go and ask my crystal ball.
FTTP can be installed privately easily if you’re willing to pay a few hundreds a month.
‘Gigabit capable’ – why downgrade full fibre services in the same bracket as docsis 3.1? Oh I know, because it suits government’s updated terminology and constant watering down of the initial full fibre pledge. Pathetic.