Rural UK ISP Truespeed Confirm Start of Full Fibre Build in Bath

Alternative network ISP Truespeed, which is supported by £75m from Aviva Investors, has confirmed that they’ve started work on their build of a new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the Somerset city of Bath, which will also include the surrounding areas of Keynsham, Saltford and South Widcombe.

The provider, which has already extended their FTTP network to 200 rural communities (mostly in Somerset), aims to cover around 500,000 premises across South West England by the end of 2025 (and 75,000 by the end of 2021). As part of that they also 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).

Shortly after that, in February 2021, the provider announced that they’d started planning for their largest rollout to date in the city of Bath, which is home to around 90,000 people. Prior to that their biggest build had been in the tiny City of Wells.

The good news is that the operator has progressed from the planning phase and is now starting street works to construct their new network in Bath, which can also be confirmed by looking at the latest network map from Thinkbroadband’s database (pictured top – the black dots are all locations that have been reached by Truespeed).

Evan Wienburg, CEO of Truespeed, said (InBath):

“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.”

The challenge for Truespeed is that they aren’t the only gigabit-capable player in Bath. The city has already been partly covered by Virgin Media’s network and Openreach have separately been expanding their FTTP rollout. In addition, Bath also features on CityFibre’s future rollout plan, although they’ve yet to start their build and that may now be made more difficult by having to fend off against three gigabit rivals.

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 (currently reduced to £34.99 a month for the first 12 months of service), which includes an 18-month minimum contract term and wireless router. The main downside is the restrictive nature of the router they supply (here).