ISP County Broadband’s FTTP Goes Live in South Cambridgeshire
Rural UK ISP County Broadband (CB) has today announced that customers in their first South Cambridgeshire villages, including Fowlmere, Newton and Thriplow, have finally started to go live on their newly built and gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.
The provider, which is backed by £46m of funding from Aviva Investors and building FTTP across rural parts of Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk in England, is now rolling out to a total (so far) of over 150 villages.
County Broadband has previously earmarked a total of 36 villages for the South Cambridgeshire part of this project, and properties in the first three of those (Fowlmere, Newton and Thriplow) are now starting to connect. The operator states that some 3,000 premises in the county will soon have access to gigabit speeds and greater reliability.
James Salmon, CB’s Director of New Territories at County Broadband, said:
“We are thrilled to welcome Fowlmere, Newton and Thriplow to our rapidly-expanding full-fibre network across East Anglia at such a pivotal time to help our region bounce back strongly from the Covid-19 pandemic.
We have an exciting rollout in rural south Cambridgeshire and demand for future-ready full-fibre broadband has never been higher. Thousands of residents, many of whom are now remote working, and businesses of all shapes and sizes will benefit from lightning-fast gigabit speeds and bullet-proof reliability thanks to our significant investment in the region’s infrastructure and future prosperity.
The pandemic has emphasised the harsh reality that Superfast broadband supplied over copper cables is too slow, too unreliable and seriously limits you – especially in rural areas.
Installing new full-fibre broadband infrastructure at this scale is a complex task and has many challenges. It requires significant planning, resource and time, with each project involving the coordination of highways, landowners, civils works and advanced fibre optic engineering.
We pledge to continue innovating, working closely with stakeholders, and keeping our communities updated as we continue to overcome the many challenges presented by each project to meet our rollout ambitions. We look forward to connecting many more rural and hard-to-reach areas in south Cambridgeshire over the coming months.”
Schools and community halls in new build areas will often also receive a free connection and service. Meanwhile, prices for their residential service can vary between different areas, although in many cases new customers will pay from £48 per month (excluding discounts) for an unlimited symmetric speed 50Mbps service with a bundled wireless router on a 24-month term (first 6 months are £28 for 300Mbps), then £55 for 600Mbps and £80 for 900Mbps. A one-off activation fee of £25 is also applicable.
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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The problem with CB is the lack of comms, which is ironic.
In Sudbury we have been told it is coming but nothing more, i’ve not pre-ordered due to some of the reviews on trustpilot so except that I may not have been on the mailing list but speaking with local residents and businesses who have pre-ordered and not heard anything. Luckily it appears that BT is slowly deploying FTTP in the town.
I’ve asked County broadband if they’re when considering my village, via their website contact page, directly using email, and on Twitter.
No response of any kind.
Cowboy Broadband strikes again . Poor network bad customer service and unreliable
Meanwhile OR have allegedly been rolling out FTTP here for 9 months !!! and it still says FTTP is unavailable and there’s no plans for it when I check. Sigh. But it’s good to see that some companies communicate their intentions and progress, unlike OR.
Bill nomantes
Openreach website clearly shows if in area is currently in plan (have you checked if you premises are in plan an what stage that plan is at . Openreach are aslo a network provider so its primary customers are service providers, Openreach updates the service providers what stage of build it is at. all of this is widely known and can be validated by service providers so they can market customers once the network is live and orderable
Yeah agree with previous comments about County Broadband’s lack of communication. I approached them on behalf of residents of the two villages that have kind of become 1 in the last decade, and they weren’t interested in rolling out their network to us.
It took 3 months to get an answer from them on whether they would consider extending their existing network the 5 miles to us, but they were not keen. So we’ve been left to see if Lightspeed will extend their Witham build to include us, or if it’s just wait and see if BT and Openreach decide to bring it forward from their preliminary date of 2025.
Do you mind saying which village(s) this is?
Kelvedon and Feering, there’s also interest from Coggeshall.
In fairness the roll-out of broadband on copper (existing network, new exchange hardware) took ages here in South cambs, I was overjoyed when the green cabinets finally appeared in Barton. This is new network and new hardware and understandably it is being rolled out where the customers get rubbish copper adsl. It will come.
These projects are not done overnight. Also, one or two of the posters are being unreasonable about their own hopes and expectations, then creating “blame” which they award to others. Don’t forget, you are debating how others should be spending very large sums of money – whilst this money is most commonly a “risk” investment by yet another party. This whole game must be hardest of all for the smaller altnets – a number of whom did not even exist until quite recently. We ought to be praising them, not criticising!