ISP iDNET Joins CityFibre’s UK FTTP Gigabit Broadband Network
UK ISP iDNET has today become the latest broadband provider to start selling Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) products to homes and businesses via CityFibre’s growing network, albeit initially only in four of their rollout locations – Derby, Cambridge, Leicester and Peterborough.
The provider, which until now has only tended to focus on Openreach based products, expects to begin marketing and connecting customers in the four locations “later this month“. Additional locations will then be added by the end of this year, with more likely to follow during 2022.
Cityfibre are currently investing £4bn to cover 1 million UK premises with their gigabit-capable FTTP network by the end of 2021, and then 8 million are expected to be “substantially completed” across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK – by the end of 2025 (here). This will also cover around 800,000 businesses, 400,000 public sector sites and 250,000 5G access points.
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Tim Davies, IDNet Director, said:
“This roll out is timely for households across Derby, Cambridge, Leicester and Peterborough, not least because many of us are gearing up to work from home a lot more in the future and we’re seeing demand for a ‘business-class’ internet experience at home which can facilitate hassle-free remote working with enough speed and bandwidth to keep the whole family streaming, gaming and Zooming!
We’re thrilled to be joining the CityFibre network and helping residents and communities future proof their homes.”
In terms of prices, iDNET appears to have a launch offer that will give new residential customers an unlimited 550Mbps (symmetric) speed package for £40 per month (normally £48), which if you take out a 24-month contract term will also come with an included WiFi 6 router. A £60 one-off activation fee tends to apply, except where special offers are involved.
By comparison, the 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) package on Openreach’s network costs £54 per month. Faster and slower tiers are also available on both networks. Curiously, iDNET seems to be trying to separate products on the two different networks by labelling those from CityFibre as FTTH and those from Openreach as FTTP, even though FTTP and FTTH are largely indistinguishable and interchangeable terms that refer to broadly the same thing.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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They seem to be overpriced considering other niche ISPs such as Zen, Giganet and Trunk Networks are selling 1 Gig down/up for £40/m on Cityfibre. But of course like IDNet, none of the smaller providers are available nationwide over the Cityfibre network just yet.
Not really fair to say overpriced. Idnet likely using the local Cityfibre product instead of the national one.
Although the comment is akin to saying that all VDSL providers are “overpriced” if they’re not cheaper than the cheapest 3 (etc). It’s not that they’re “over” priced, just that they’re expensive compared.
The ISPs i mentioned also use the Cityfibre network, ie I did a like for like comparison.
IDNet don’t have their own backhaul and instead resell a mixture of other providers. Id imagine they are effectively reselling TalkTalk’s cityfibre product since they have a lot more cityfibre coverage than Zen and both IDNet and TalkTalk have the maximum 500mbps right now at £40pm. IDNet already offer TTB as a backhaul option.
@A
If IDNet are reselling TT services over Cityfibre then what is IDNet’s 1000/1000 service based on, considering TT don’t yet sell 1000/1000 on Cityfibre outside York?
@Home And Away Fair point, I’ve also checks on a property which only has TalkTalk and Vodafone available on Cityfibre and it says it wasn’t available.
I didn’t check their website before and assumed the 550 launch package mentioned here was the only package. Id imagine they are reselling Zen then, not really sure why anyone would go for it when Zens support is generally pretty good and will give you 900/900 on cityfibre for £40.
iDNET resell Zen on OpenReach now.
Any use of Talktalk Business backhaul was Zen using TTB as their supplier.
I manage 2 iDNET lines and 6 Zen lines.
Every single time all 6 Zen lines have a PPP drop the iDNET lines have the exact same drop.
I would assume they are again reselling Zens service here.
People complain about other ISP’s being expensive but then complain when their bucket shop ISP fails regularly, I guess with some people you just can’t win…
@Mike
Zen, Giganet and Trunk Networks are far from being “bucketshop” ISPs. I’d actually say the latter 2 are even better Than IDNet based on my own experiences.
@Home and Away Indeed, when Giganet and Zen charge £42 and £40pm respectively for 900 on CF £60pm is overpriced.
Correction: £40pm for both operators.
I have to say, I’ve been with iDnet for a while and they are pretty good, I can email them or raise an issue in the app and they reply in an hour or two which is great compared to others. Plus it usually works, had an outage earlier this week and they said it was a power cut in a suppliers kit somewhere, but that was the only one in as long as I can remember. Expensive but with home working worth it plus they don’t put prices up every year.
To be fair between IDNET and Smarty touch wood my comms are set. I don’t get 5G or have FTTP but can get 4G ish and have 70mbps down and 20 up. One day I’ll change if Starlink or Wessex Internet give me faster speeds.
My isp are the best ever. Their reply to my email or via ticket within instant to 30 minutes. Brilliant far better than Plusnet and my former ISP IDNet and Zen Internet.
@adslmax who are they? Or is this sarcastic?
IIRC he’s with unchained. I must admit I’m surprised by their business model — they offer a static IP with every package, but they only have 768 IPv4 addresses for their whole network…
@Ben that explains why they respond in 30 mins to a support ticket with only 768 customers lol.
768 customers wouldn’t be a suprise with £45pm for 80/20 FTTC. I know an ISP with good support is going to be more expensive but there is a point in which its too expensive IMO. Also most problems I’ve found to be with Openreach so the ISP doesn’t matter as much.
They have a lot more than 768 IPv4 addresses.
https://bgp.tools/as/12496#prefixes lists them having 80 x /24 blocks, so 20480 IPv4 addresses. That assumes that they don’t have more that they aren’t announcing in BGP either.
Also, not all customers require an IPv4 from IDNet, depends if they have more niche customers doing BGP over the DSL lines etc.
@Pezza I was referring to unchained. 768 IPv4 addresses × £45 per month is only ~£400k per year, which feels like a miniscule amount of revenue for an ISP. For context, RevK of AAISP received a dividend of £600k according to their latest accounts (ending March 2020) — i.e. their revenues were probably substantially higher.
@Pezza I like smaller isp but I know expensive for my G.fast with unchainedisp but it worth it in my view with Static IP Address, TalkTalk Business are excellent connection with low ping and isp are excellent support as he always make sure everything is ok.
My g.fast with unchainedisp stats:
xdslctl info –stats
xdslctl: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Last Retrain Reason: 1
Last initialization procedure status: 0
Max: Upstream rate = 38089 Kbps, Downstream rate = 225875 Kbps
Bearer: 0, Upstream rate = 38313 Kbps, Downstream rate = 225951 Kbps
Link Power State: L0
Mode: G.fast Annex A
TPS-TC: PTM Mode(0x0)
Trellis: U:ON /D:ON
Line Status: No Defect
Training Status: Showtime
Down Up
SNR (dB): 2.9 2.9
Attn(dB): 38.6 0.0
Pwr(dBm): 0.0 4.0
Since Link time = 25 days 16 hours 24 min 33 sec
FEC: 11470528 10282970
CRC: 0 0
ES: 0 0
SES: 0 0
UAS: 0 0
LOS: 0 0
LOF: 0 0
LOM: 0 0
Retr: 0
HostInitRetr: 0
FastRetr: 0
FailedRetr: 0
FailedFastRetr: 0
BTw estimated in Range A Clean for my g.fast are 230/35 so it pretty good for my g.fast 225/38
This is completely irrelevant though. Your line stats are determined entirely by the Openreach infrastructure, which is the same regardless of which OR-based ISP you use.
Not “entirely”.
The ISP has a choice of DLM policy which can have a (sometimes considerable) impact on sync speeds.