Hampstead Fibre Build Premium FTTP Broadband in North London

Network builder and UK ISP Hampstead Fibre has today revealed the first details of their new rollout plan for a “premium” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband service in parts of North London, which seems to be targeting wealthy homeowners and businesses who can afford something more akin to a leased line.

We first spotted the provider last September 2021 (here), but at the time they were still being established and merely spoke of their ambition to build a new “network initially in London and latterly in other locations across the UK.” London is the target of several aggressively competitive full fibre builds by Virgin Media (VMO2), Openreach (BT), G.Network, CommunityFibre and Hyperoptic, which makes it a difficult place for new entrants.

However, despite the challenges, Hampstead Fibre recently began their first civil engineering work around parts of North London’s N2 and N6 postcode areas, which is being supported by civil engineering firm VGC Group. The ongoing “pilot” build currently includes three roads around Hampstead Heath – The Bishops Avenue, Winnington Road and Compton Avenue (these are about half-way to completion).

A quick look reveals a number of interesting things about their pilot build. Firstly, there are currently no gigabit-capable broadband networks in this area and, secondly, you’d need to be fairly rich to be able to afford the local homes – some of which stretch into the tens of millions of pounds.

The provider is clearly conscious of the areas they’re targeting, which is aptly reflected by their planned service pricing (more on that later) and on the front page of their temporary website: “Connecting the world’s most sought after streets to the world’s most well-connected datacentres at the speed of light.”

The company’s founder, Dr Annie Yang, hails from a poorly served, if very affluent, part of North London herself and this is how the ISP was born (the capital city still has quite a few patches like this).

Dr Annie Yang, Director of Hampstead Fibre, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Frankly I was extremely disappointed with the internet service … I was getting 0.5 Mbps upload, at which point it’s almost impossible to even have a video call. There’s no Virgin here, so the only other option would have been to get a leased line (which is very common around us), but I felt that this would be giving in and so Hampstead Fibre was born.”

However, in targeting such areas, the provider knew that it also needed to develop a much more premium product than the GPON based networks of shared capacity being deployed by others. As a result, their social media pages are promising to build a “DEDICATED FIBRE PER HOME“, which sounds more like a leased line style approach and indeed that is the intention.

“Our real competition is leased lines, to capture that market we need to be both cheaper than a leased line and offer a higher quality service,” said Dr Yang.”Everything we’ve built has been about quality, without regard for cost. The entire network is dedicated fibre to every home, not GPON where up to 128 houses are sharing bandwidth on one fibre. This means we’re deploying massive distribution cables, mostly 288 fibre cables.”

All of this will be supported by a dedicated fibre link to their primary point-of-presence in Telehouse North, as well as “full redundancy” to reduce the risk of outages. “We’re lighting these long-distance links with multiple 10G DWDM waves right now,” added Dr Yang, before remarking that it would be possible to then move up to multiples of 200G waves. Suffice to say, capacity does not seem to be a problem.

At launch, the ISP will be offering just two plans: 1Gbps for £100/month and 10Gbps for £500/month, which relatively speaking is not cheap, but then we doubt those in their pilot build area will be too concerned. The provider suggests that they could potentially even build a 100Gbps package for homes, but obviously there’s not much point in that while most computers, internet services and end-user devices cannot fully harness it.

In fairness though, we have seen regular ISPs that still charge around the £100 mark for 1Gbps (County Broadband, Ecom, Jurassic Fibre, GoFibre etc.), although most of those are focused on rural areas and thus have more challenging economics to consider (note: some homes in Hampstead Fibre’s patch are over 25 metres apart). But such expensive plans are becoming less common, with 1Gbps now typically in the £50-£70 region or less.

At the end of the day, we like that Hampstead Fibre is trying a different approach from other ISPs by focusing on quality and performance over affordability. We hope they succeed in that, although much will depend upon whether the level of take-up is sufficient to fuel future growth. Assuming the pilot goes well, then we expect to see them expanding into the Hampstead Garden Suburb and other areas.