New UK ISP WhyFibre Plan FTTP Broadband for South England

Just when you thought there were already enough alternative network (altnet) providers building gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband in the UK, along comes another one in the shape of WhyFibre, which plans to cover “underserved” parts of South England.

The new player in town came to our attention after it put in a request for Code Powers from Ofcom in order to help speed-up the planned deployment of new fibre optic infrastructure and cut costs, not least by reducing the number of licenses needed for street works. It can also help facilitate access to run fibre through Openreach’s existing ducts and poles (PIA).

The application itself doesn’t tell us much, only that they intend to build FTTP around “selected locations” in the South of England and will focus upon “areas that are underserved by other operators, including areas where other operators have no plans or limited plans to serve in the next four years.” Most such applications tend to say the same thing, even if they end up doing a lot of overbuild with gigabit rivals.

The company itself appears to be London-based and was only incorporated on 30th June 2021. On top of that their website, which carries a number of positive customer testimonials (impressive given that we can’t find a live service) and, without any substantiation, claims to offer the “UK’s fastest and most reliable internet service“, states that prices will start at £22 per month for a 100Mbps package and rise to £45 for 900Mbps.

The sole Director of the company is named as Dumitru Ban, who since late 2019 has also been an active Director for both DIBAN CONSTRUCTION LIMITED (12367259) and DIBAN ACADEMY LIMITED (12316285) in Luton. After a bit more digging, we found another string of companies linked to somebody with the name Dumitru Ban in Luton, including Diban Limited (09016088), which seems to do some telecoms related civil engineering work.

Assuming this is the same person, then they appear to have a strong level of history and experience behind them in the market. All of that will come in handy, particularly given the number of full fibre networks that are already deploying across the South of England. Hopefully more details will emerge in the near future.