Fibrus Builds Full Fibre Broadband Network to 104,381 Premises
Alternative network ISP Fibrus, which is currently building a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across Northern Ireland and Northern England, has today announced that their full fibre infrastructure has now reached 104,381 premises (up from 58,000 premises in August 2021).
Nearly all of this build will be reflecting both their commercial and state aid supported (Project Stratum) progress in Northern Ireland, since the operator’s expansion into England is much more recent and does not yet appear to have gone live. Just to recap, Project Stratum – excluding their commercial rollout – seeks to cover 85,000 premises by the end of 2025 (here), while the build in England targets 300,000 by mid-2024 (here).
In terms of future progress, the rapidly growing operator also predicted that they’d continue to ramp-up their rollout through 2022 and now aim to cover 250,000 premises across, we assume, both England and Northern Ireland by the end of the year.
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Conor Harrison, Fibrus COO, said (Business Eye):
“What we are delivering is the most important infrastructure project of a generation, and at Fibrus we thrive on the impact it is having on rural people, families, and local businesses.
For too long people have been let down and left in the digital dark ages by other providers and that is why by the end of 2025 our aim is that every property has access to proper full fibre infrastructure. Hitting 100,000 premises is a major milestone in our journey to making that happen, and we will be carrying on at full speed.”
Customers of the provider typically pay from £39.99 per month (currently discounted to £19.99) for an unlimited 150Mbps package with a router and free installation, which rises to £59.99 per month for their top 1000Mbps tier on a 12-month contract term.
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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Meanwhile, from TBB – The number of Openreach FTTP premises passed is 660,999 in our database at the time of publication.
@The Facts: So what’s your point?
You’re a factor of ten out. Openreach have passed 6.5 million premises and have approx 1.5 million customers connected to FTTP as of BT Groups most recent quarterly results (Q3 FY22)
https://www.bt.com/bt-plc/assets/documents/investors/financial-reporting-and-news/quarterly-results/2021-22/q3/q3-fy22-kpis.pdf
The news story here was about Fibrus, not BT/Openreach. But since The Facts prides himself with everything to do with BT/Openreach, perhaps some true facts, rather than misleading half-truths, should be pointed out here:
According to https://www.openreach.com/locations/northern-ireland, province wide more than 575k homes and businesses can get Full Fibre Broadband there (the figure might have gone up a a bit since then). This compares to roughly 100 000 premises coverage by Fibrus in the same area, see Mark Jackson’s news story above. Fibrus is just one of a number of different altnets.
According to https://www.inca.coop/news/point-topic-2021 (published about seven months ago if I remember it correctly) altnet providers will deliver to 6.637 million premises by the end of 2021, before rising to 29.9 million by the end of 2025.
This link gives a good overview of altnets’ fibre coverage in Northern Ireland:
https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?tab=2&election=1#8/54.333/-5.630/altfttp/
What BT/Openreach is doing now is to be commended. However, this should have happened more than a decade ago, it already had a nationwide infrastructure of ducts and poles from the very start, unlike altnets. So what took them so long? And up to this day Openreach-based fibre ISPs dont’t do symmetric fibre, unlike most altnets.
The INCA report figures are of course for the whole of the UK, not just Northern Ireland!
Their prices are 50% less in most towns vs rural areas. I pay double what people less than a mile down the same road pay for the same service.