Persimmon Homes ISP FibreNest to Launch UK Wholesale Service

FibreNest, which is the full fibre (FTTP) broadband network for UK new build home sites developed by Persimmon Homes, has announced their intention to launch a wholesale division (FibreNest Wholesale) so that rival ISPs can finally offer services via their new gigabit-speed network.

The move comes only a few months after several ISPs and Government MPs (here) criticised Persimmon’s FibreNest sibling for what they perceived as allegedly creating a monopoly (i.e. deploying their own full fibre across new build sites, while making it difficult for rival ISPs and full fibre broadband networks to offer competing services in the same area).

On the other hand, Persimmon says that their residents often end up enjoying better broadband speeds than many other parts of the UK, and they can access that from the day they move in, as opposed to the usual delay of several days or weeks – sometimes even months – before a new service goes live.

The aforementioned service activation delays were one of the primary reasons why FibreNest was established in 2018, since new homeowners would often blame Persimmon for the slow broadband installations of other operators (e.g. Openreach). But in fairness, today’s FTTP market is often a lot quicker to get homes connected, although delays can still be an issue.

What’s Changing?

Back in June the property developer responded to the MPs complaints by informing ISPreview.co.uk that they were “currently in the process of inviting alternative internet service providers to offer their services to customers over our infrastructure,” and now we have a better idea of what that will look like via FibreNest Wholesale (launched today).

Liam Ronan, Group Technology Director for Persimmon Homes, said:

“FibreNest has been hugely successful in addressing the legacy service provider issues and we are delighted that we are able to support our customers with continued connectivity on move-in day. We have always been determined that our customers should have a choice of broadband provider but, as with any a start-up broadband business, we have lacked sufficient scale to appeal to Retail Service Providers to date.

However, that is now changing. We continue to grow rapidly and with a buoyant new homes market expected to support a robust growth trajectory for the business, and plans to offer our services to customers outside of the Persimmon network who are still suffering from poor speeds associated with legacy network provision, we expect FibreNest to accelerate its expansion significantly over the next few years.

We are fast approaching critical mass, making a wholesale offer attractive to Retail Service Providers, and we are now taking steps to expand choice for our customers at the earliest opportunity. We look forward to engaging with the industry over the coming months as we build our wholesale business.”

Interestingly, FibreNest claims to have aligned their wholesale pricing structure “as closely as possible” to that of Openreach (BT), notwithstanding the material difference in size and scale economies between the two businesses. “Persimmon wishes to make FibreNest’s wholesale service attractive to the market to help ensure its customers are able to choose which provider they prefer,” said the operator.

Naturally, the proof will be in how successful they are at attracting ISPs to their network. One catch here is that adapting to any new broadband platform does carry a cost for ISPs, which means that providers tend to favour those with a little more scale behind them. But FibreNest are growing quite rapidly and hope that they’ll be able to entice more providers as time goes on.

In keeping with all this, we note that the property developer now only installs bridge-mode ONTs (optical modems) on the inside walls of every plot, as opposed to their own gateway ONTs (this would be the cheaper way), which makes it easier for third-party retail ISPs to connect their own broadband routers in to FibreNest’s infrastructure.