Alncom and RunFibre Extend Full Fibre to South Gloucestershire
Alnwick-based UK rural broadband ISP Alncom and new Bristol-based ISP RunFibre have joined forces in order to extend the reach of their joint gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which was already available to remote parts of Northumberland and Durham, but is now growing into South Gloucestershire.
At present both providers are still fairly small, although Alncom recently managed to secure a key funding boost from strategic investors at Railsite Telecom and that’s expected to fuel their future expansion (here). Alncom’s most recent GPON FTTP build has been in their home town of Alnwick, but they’ve also built across the College Valley, Powburn, Ellingham, Ingram Valley, Warkworth, Acklington and into the Scottish Borders area.
As part of their growth strategy and funding boost, Alncom also appointed a new Director, Dave Swanston, who was put in charge of the new build program. Except Dave isn’t only Alncom’s Ops Director, he is also CEO and co-owner of his own provider – RunFibre – with his brother and cousin. Consequently, the two companies have started working together in order to support their respective projects.
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The partnership means that all RunFibre FTTP areas will be on Alncom’s wholesale network. RunFibre will also use backhaul connectivity from Alncom, while Alncom will supply all of the active kit and manage the network monitoring. In return, RunFibre will also build infrastructure, market and sales, and control the whole CRM suite (customer relationship management). RunFibre will also be doing the installations and maintenance.
Dave Swanston said:
“Alncom have honed their rural broadband skills over the past 15 years in some of the rural locations in the country in Northumberland and County Durham and the collaboration is a huge step forward for rural South Gloucester. This will genuinely change lives.”
The first villages in South Gloucestershire to benefit from this and gain access to their full fibre network will be Hawkesbury Upton, Inglestone Common and surrounding properties. The new project is said by RunFibre to be the first of many joint ventures with Alncom and will cover nearly 600 residential and business premises in the area, while also making use of rural gigabit vouchers.
Work on the new build is due to start towards the end of this month and will involve a fair bit of Openreach’s Physical Infrastructure Access product (i.e. running new fibre through and over existing cable ducts and poles).
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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Do these Altnets still have to pay Openreach the PIA rental charge, irrespective of customer take up? I only ask because their business model must come under severe strain if they don’t reach a certain critical mass. The cost of establishing a Head End, housing the OLT’s, providing backbone connectivity, aircon, etc, etc, etc, would also impact them without a substantial number of customers. Running a network isn’t cheap, and scale is everything, makes me wonder how many of the small Altnets will survive long term
Smaller deployments tend to be demand-led, so they’ll establish a certain level of local interest and engage with the community before they decide to build.
Ladder hole issue?
Do you know if Inglestone Common deployment plans to extend to Wickwar or Horton? Both villages are on the edge of the common.