ISP Wessex Internet UK Extend Full Fibre to North Dorset Towns

Rural UK ISP Wessex Internet has today announced that they intend to extend their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network to cover homes and businesses in the North Dorset market towns of Blandford Forum and Sturminster Newton.

The provider, which has already built a good-sized FTTP and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network across large parts of rural Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire and Wiltshire, is currently present in many of the communities that surround both Blandford and Sturminster Newton. As such it makes sense to link those two up as they continue to grow.

The deployment is expected to benefit over 8,000 premises and work on this, which will be undertaken in several phases, is due to commence during Autumn 2021. The commercial deployment is also a good complement to last year’s CDS contract win (here), which will separately see them deploy FTTP to 3,600 rural premises in parts of South Somerset (backed by a public investment of £4.7m).

Hector Gibson Fleming, WI Managing Director, said:

“We’re hugely excited to be starting this new chapter of expansion to the market towns at the heart of Wessex’s territory. We’ve already connected many of the villages around both Blandford and Sturminster Newton and this announcement is a natural evolution of our rollout.

As a business focussing exclusively in our local region, our priority has always been to bring fast, reliable broadband to rural communities overlooked by other providers. We’ve seen significant interest from people in these towns who love our unbeatable connectivity and want to be covered too.

Our local market towns play a vital role in creating a vibrant rural economy and we want to ensure their residents and businesses have access to fast, reliable connectivity.”

Prices for their full fibre service typically start at £29 per month for a 100Mbps (15Mbps upload) tier on a 12-month term, although this only comes with a 100GB data allowance and you’ll have to pay £49 (one-off) for activation. By comparison their top unlimited usage package will give you 900Mbps (300Mbps upload) speeds for £84 per month.