Connexin Pledge to End KCOM’s Broadband Monopoly in Hull UK UPDATE
Fixed wireless broadband ISP Connexin last year revealed that they were looking to deploy their own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the North of England (here). The provider has now confirmed that they’re investing £80m to “[end] the broadband monopoly” in Hull and East Yorkshire (tacit reference to KCOM).
At present KCOM’s own FTTP network dominates Hull, and they’ve also been busy investing £100m to reach lots of new areas across both East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. But Connexin, which has long offered a wireless network in some of the same areas, now appears intent upon bringing a “brand new independent full-fibre network” to homes and businesses in the Hull and East Riding area.
The operator has just announced that they’ve “already started the build, with the first homes expected to be connected by the end of 2021,” although at the time of writing they haven’t yet named any specific areas. We took a quick look across Hull and could only see work by KCOM and CityFibre (BT too, if you look just outside the city), but it’s possible that Connexin may be starting somewhere else.
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Connexin Statement
“The people of Hull and the East Riding deserve better from their broadband supplier and every aspect of our new network has been designed with customer experience in mind.
Hull deserves great customer service. Hull deserves choice. Hull deserves rewards for loyal customers and most importantly, Hull deserves a better broadband supplier.
Oh, and did we mention that we’re not just building a new fibre network capable of 1Gb speeds… ours is built to handle speeds of up to 10Gb!”
At present the provider has not revealed any package details, but if you live in the area then you can register your interest on their website.
UPDATE 12:08pm
A few more details have just come our way this morning.
Furqan Alamgir, co-founder and CEO of Connexin, said:
“For too long the people of Hull and East Riding have had no real say on who provides their broadband and what network they want to use. This simply isn’t the right way to do things.
We have felt the pain of operating and growing a business in a ‘monopoly’ environment. We tried working collaboratively with the incumbent to create a more competitive broadband marketplace in Hull but given the challenges we have faced around infrastructure sharing, we have decided to invest in our city and build an independent alternative Full Fibre network for the region. Our goal is to create new jobs locally, drive competition to improve the services available to residents and to help grow and attract new and existing businesses as well as investment into the region.”
Connexin is working collaboratively with Modini Ltd, a programme delivery company specialising in complex programmes, on this rollout, and construction of the network is being undertaken by SCD Group.
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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 and Linkedin.
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While there are millions of homes without a full fibre option, this company chooses purposely to overbuild. Great.
It will definitely mean lower prices though as kcom charges a lot.
Seems a bit risky, given Macquarie have actively said they want to improve KCOM’s wholesale offering when they bought it.
Once KCOM open up their network to other ISPs, e.g., Sky etc, Connexin will get blown out of the water.
This is the issue. The network is open, but the cost is too much for anyone to come in
Connexin have said they’ll openly welcome people to use their infrastructure. You’ve more chance of competition coming through them than you have KCOM.
If Connexin can get this right, KCOM will have to then reduce their prices to be as competitive as Connexin
This might spur KCOM into doing the right thing with better wholesale pricing.
Macquire are not the nicest investors so predatory pricing behaviour might emerge to kill off the competition. But that would advantage the consumer pricing.
That said if the ROI is too low then expanded roll out rates will drop.
So there is a choice to be made: pay a bit more for FTTP and get a lot more of it rolled out fast or pay very little for it and wonder why the final 30% of the build takes forever and it is built at the slowest possible rate that just keeps OFCOM off everyones back.
The reality is that unless and until some of the AltNets bundle up with the likes of KCOM the addressable market is too small for anyone to bother integrating their sales/CRM systems together. This was what killed GFast: not a big enough market and too uneven. Why would you invest to address a small market when you have address a large one with OR?
Well done on making sure Yorkshire was one of the keywords. You wouldn’t want the Yorkie crowd to begin rebelling, especially those who were cast out of Yorkshire and into the Humberside designation years ago!
Yeah, and the rest of the UK deserves better than the BT/Virgin’s monopoly too.
What are you on about? The rest of the country has the likes of Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone, Plusnet, Zen etc… Hardly a monopoly is it
This company have decided to impose the installation of telegraph poles on kingswood hull,a modern community with all utilities underground including superfast broadband.
No consultation with residents or thought to the impact of installation of this ugly above ground infrastructure.
This is a disgrace and if companies want to provide alternative service then they should have to match any existing infrastructure, if it’s already underground should stay underground.
This does not seem very environmentally friendly and has caused anger in the community, will not use this service even if free.