Rural UK ISP Truespeed Bring FTTP Broadband Rollout to Bath
Full fibre ISP Truespeed, which has been deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across rural areas in South West England, has announced that the city of Bath in Somerset (including surrounding areas) will be the next major area to benefit from the rollout of their new network.
The provider, which is supported by an investment of £75m from Aviva Investors (here) and has so far deployed to 200 communities (mostly in Somerset), aims to cover around 500,000 premises across the South West by the end of 2025 (and 75,000 by the end of 2021). As part of that they also recently won a £6.7m public investment to cover 15,000 premises in parts of B&NES (Bath & North East Somerset), North Somerset, Mendip and a bit of Sedgemoor (here).
The good news is that they’ve now started their expansion into the city of Bath, which is home to around 90,000 people. In parallel, the firm will also be expanding its footprint into neighbouring areas in Somerset including Keynsham, Saltford and South Widcombe.
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Meanwhile in the city of Wells, where Truespeed began deploying in June 2020, they’ve now passed over 3,000 premises. Today the firm has also announced that they’re boosting their investment in Wells, with plans to connect more areas of the city and to continue expanding into the surrounding areas, such as Wookey and Coxley.
Evan Wienburg, CEO of Truespeed, said:
“We’re excited to get going in Bath while stepping up the roll-out of our full fibre network in Wells and surrounding areas in Somerset. We’re lighting up our map of the South-West and bringing under-served households and businesses the future-proofed gigabit capable connectivity they deserve.”
Wera Hobhouse, MP for Bath, said:
“Truespeed’s investment will benefit the city enormously as ultrafast broadband connectivity can’t come soon enough for Bath businesses and residents. It’s great that a Bath-based firm is at the forefront of supporting our communities and taking our beautiful city into the full fibre fast lane.”
At this stage it’s not clear precisely how many premises in Bath will benefit from the rollout, although in terms of gigabit-capable rivals the city has already been partly covered by Virgin Media’s network and Openreach have separately been expanding their FTTP rollout into the central area. On top of that Bath also features on Cityfibre’s rollout plan, but they’ve yet to make much progress and today’s announcement may add a complication.
Customers of Truespeed’s service typically pay from £29.99 per month for an unlimited 80Mbps service (symmetric speeds) and this goes up to £69.99 for their top 900Mbps+ package, which includes an 18-month minimum contract term and wireless router.
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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Wonder what this will mean in practice, been signed up since May 2020 and apparently my area (Larkhall) is still at 7.5% of signed orders – they require 30%. Is this investment going to translate in lowering this threshold or something else or nothing? Desperate for some real internet, as due to the local anti 5G folks there are not a lot of options unfortunately!
Well I’m over in Bathampton,there is practically no intrest here for Truespeed,went to several meetings in 2020,at one meeting only two people turned up,me & one other.
Cabinets 30 & 39 have G Fast,so that covers Bathampton Lane & High Street,as far as Chapel Row,so most peeps get anything upto 330Mb depending on distane,even parts of Down Lane can get Superfast around 150Mb,so many peeps are happy.
Some years ago tried to get support going for Openreach FTTP,total waste of time,no intrest at all.
Just look at this link https://checker.ofcom.org.uk/broadband-coverage ,founds it’s pretty spot on for speeds here.
Got a persistent line fault here, & OR will NOT sort it,several engineers,say they will escalate the matter,still nothing down, even my isp can’t get OR to sort it.
I thnk a lot of people are happy with their bandwidth – I only get 28Mb on copper-to-the-cabinet but I can watch TV, movies, use Zoom etc. The problem with copper is that I have a serious fault every 9 months and would prefer the reliability of fibre. Unfortunately Truespeed aren’t coming anywhere near me so I’m stuck with BT.
Telegraph poles are so unsightly.
Then again if it could deliver FTTP, I could live with it.
It just looks horrible all those wires spread everywhere. Like some soft of neo-noir film, or going back in time to the 1950s. Hey looky here Fred, we’ve got some ultra fast, delivered by telegraphy poles…
Those are electricity poles that have had telecoms added to them at a later date.
Why health and safety is a priorityno safety helmet and no ladder ties required with this company by looks of it
The ladder tie could be out of shot at ground level?
Can’t see the ground in the foreground of the shot.
The safety helmet is a bit strange. But realistically if you are climbing a ladder to get at the pole where is the overhead risk coming from? Perhaps birds/drones? In any risk assessment the source and likelihood of the risk being encountered needs to be assessed.
The helmets that OR issue don’t look like climbing g helmets to me so I suspect they would be pretty useless in a ladder fall.
Telling everyone to wear a helmet at every point in time is just a cop out.
The risk that requires a helmet when climbing is that of hitting your head on a step. Plenty of people have knocked themselves out doing just that over the years and have fallen.
The risk if you’re at the foot of a pole and someone else is at the top is that they’ll drop something on you.
I doubt they mentioned to the electric company that their safety would be so poor when working on their poles.
Makes you wonder how bad they are when they are not having photos taken.
To be fair that photo was a few years old and staged for a bit of humour with the cat, I recall. Anyway I’ve added a more recent one now.
A ladder tie is used to tie a ladder to the roof of the vehicle, which isn’t needed in this shot as it’s being removed from the van?
Also a helmet is for if you smack your head on a peg or on a curly at the top of a pole or any bracket that’s attached at the top of the pole, if you’ve never done the job and have no idea about it, it’s probably best for you to read up about it at the very least.