New Build Homes on Reading Site Finally Get Full Fibre After Long Fight

Residents of the Parklands Development in Reading (Berkshire), which was built a few years ago by CALA and had a battle just to get FTTC from Openreach (BT) installed, are celebrating after managing to convince Hyperoptic to deploy their “full fibre” (FTTP/B) broadband network to all 300+ homes on the site.

The Parklands Development, which originally consisted of about 290 homes in 2016/17 but has since expanded, is situated in the Reading suburb of Woodley on the University of Reading’s former Bulmershe Court campus. Most of the local properties are 3-5 bedroom semi-detached and terraced houses.

Back in 2016 this development made the news after we reported on how CALA had verbally promised “fibre broadband” to new residents, but then only delivered slow ADSL2+ via Openreach (here). We should point out that, on new build sites, it’s the property developer that holds most responsibility for choosing the local broadband solution (Openreach only had to meet the basic USO requirements – these changed in 2020).

However, after a bit of a battle with residents, CALA and Openreach eventually agreed to upgrade the area with faster Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) services. The good news is that, several years later, residents have now successfully convinced Hyperoptic – at its own cost – to deploy their gigabit-capable “full fibre” network to all 350+ homes on the development.

Phillip Parkinson, Resident, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Since then we’ve managed (after many emails and lots of persistence) to convince Hyperoptic to deploy their full-fibre network to all 350+ homes on the development. The development is mixed, made up of single and multiple dwelling units, homes and apartments as well as a Co-Op shop and a home for the elderly.

The project is funded by Hyperoptic and came mostly as a result of emails to Dana [Hyperoptic’s CEO] and Boris [Hyperoptic’s Chief Strategist]. Boris in particular has been quite instrumental in pushing the build along and getting his team in place to do so.

A detailed survey and proposal were completed, the fibre network has been laid in existing Openreach ducts and, later this month, Hyperoptic will be onsite again to complete the fibre spine work before moving to the next stage of the build.”

As an ISP Hyperoptic are perhaps more traditionally associated with deploying their network to large buildings (e.g. big apartment or office blocks) / Multi-Dwelling Units (MDU), but over the past couple of years they’ve increasingly begun to run more of their fibre through Openreach’s existing cable ducts (e.g. Physical Infrastructure Access) and to individual houses, otherwise known as Single-Dwelling Units (SDU).

Thor Vidal, Hyperoptic’s Head Of Developments (New Build), told ISPreview.co.uk:

“We are pleased to bring the gold standard of full fibre to the Parklands Development, and bring a step change in connectivity for its residents. As we have scaled we are now able to service smaller developments and individual homes. We have a nationwide partnership with CALA Homes and will be installed as standard in all its new developments [example].

It was CALA and our partnership that drove this installation forward. We are pleased to also be installing in a number of CALAs existing developments as well and we urge everyone who is interested in our services to register interest on our website.”

We don’t often get much feedback about Hyperoptic’s SDU builds, so it’s good to see projects like this where the operator is increasingly expanding into regular housing. The fact that Openreach weren’t the ones to do this also helps to show just how much more diverse and competitive the UK market for gigabit broadband has become (Summary of UK Full Fibre Builds).

Hyperoptic’s gigabit fibre is currently present in parts of 43 UK towns and cities across well over 400,000 premises, and they’ve previously expressed an ambition to cover 2 million UK premises by the end of 2021, followed by 5 million come the end of 2024 (mostly in urban areas). The last progress update we had on this was in late 2019 (here).