ISP VISPA Starts Rollout of its Own UK FTTP Broadband Network

UK ISP VISPA (Vispa Internet) appears to have officially started the rollout of their own gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the town of Marple, which is in the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport (Greater Manchester) and home to a population of 24,000.

The first hints of such a project surfaced last November, after the ISP put in a request for Code Powers from Ofcom (here), which are often sought by operators in order to help speed-up the deployment of new networks and cut costs by reducing the number of licences needed for related street works across the United Kingdom.

The project was then officially confirmed in February 2021 (here), when the provider revealed that their build would aim to cover 10,000 homes over the next 18 months, but at the time VISPA declined to say precisely where they intended to deploy – although they’ve previously built a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network around parts of Cheshire and the provider itself is based in Manchester.

Since then, we note that VISPA’s own in-house team of fibre engineers have recently also completed training that has accredited them to work with Openreach (BT). This means they’ll be able to harness some of the operator’s existing cable ducts and poles in order to run their own fibre (Physical Infrastructure Access).

However, the big news is that they’ve now started work in Marple. In a brief statement, the provider said on Friday: “An exciting day for all the team at Vispa as we physically connected our very first FTTP property in Marple. Although the big switch on is 2-3 weeks away, customers who have been left behind with sub 10Mbps speeds will soon benefit from Ultrafast fibre up to 1Gbps.”

The catch here is that Marple is already well served by Virgin Media’s gigabit-capable broadband network, so VISPA won’t have the town all to themselves.