Rural Broadband ISP Truespeed Appoints James Lowther as CEO
Alternative network UK ISP Truespeed, which is supported by £75m from Aviva Investors and has been busy building their own 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across Somerset, have today replaced their long serving CEO, Evan Wienburg, with James Lowther.
The provider has already extended their FTTP network to 200 rural communities (mostly in Somerset) and last year confirmed that they held an “ambitious target to reach 500,000 properties within the next five years,” although they’ve been quite coy with any details on the progress of that build (previously they expected to hit around 75,000 premises by the end of 2021).
Nevertheless, it looks like a change may be coming after the provider appointed James Lowther to the top job. James holds over 16 years of experience in the telecoms sector, most recently as Group Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) of mobile operator Lebara and, prior to that, he was also the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of rival rural ISP Gigaclear. Before all that, he also held senior roles at Com Hem (now Tele2 Group) and Virgin Media.
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Clarke Osborne, Truespeed Chairman, said:
“I would like to thank our outgoing CEO Evan Wienburg for his energy and passion since the firm’s inception – and for building Truespeed into the thriving, award-winning, community-oriented business it is today.
James is taking over the CEO reins at a pivotal time. We are embarking on our next major growth phase to bring ultrafast, ultra-reliable, full fibre broadband connectivity to hundreds of thousands of families and businesses in the South West. James’s dynamism, leadership track record and breadth of experience will be invaluable as we move forward.”
James Lowther, Truespeed CEO, added:
“I am delighted to join Truespeed as we ramp up the next phase of our mission to roll out ultrafast, ultra-reliable broadband that will level up the South West. Truespeed has a great team in place and we will push hard on the throttle to accelerate our network build.”
Sadly, the announcement doesn’t say why Evan Wienburg was replaced, although at the time of writing he continues to be listed as the provider’s CEO on LinkedIn and is an active Director of the ISP via Companies House. Changes of management often precede a change of strategy, and Truespeed today exists in a much more aggressively competitive market than it did a few years ago. Suffice to say, we’ll be interested to see what happens next.
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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Be good to see Truespeed join LINX and LONAP and peer off traffic themselves, hiding their network behind a tier-2 like Jump is not a good customer experience. An ISP with a £75m investment should be operating an edge network themselves.
As someone who takes transit from Jump and considers Jump to be technically excellent, I find nothing wrong with Truespeed’s decision to utilize Jump’s in-house knowledge and expertise to tackle thorny issues such as DDoS, peering relationships, capacity planning, etc.
I reckon that Truespeed should carry on doing what they do best and build the best damn FTTP network they can because clearly it works well enough for them.
If you are a Truespeed customer and are seeing packet loss/high jitter/latency on Jump’s infrastructure, you should raise a ticket with Truespeed and based on my own experiences as a customer of Jump, I *know* that Jump will be on the case immediately.
I’m in somerset and this provider can’t build network in Bridgwater. All we have here is old fashioned adsl connection with horrible upload speeds. I wish big companies like truespeed cared about small towns.
What’s your postcode?
A quick search on here shows Jurassic Fibre will be building in Bridgwater and Openreach has deployed G.fast and some FTTP. Maybe not in your area though.