YouFibre’s FTTP Broadband Goes Live in First Part of Scotland
UK ISP YouFibre has today announced that the first customers can now connect to their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the South Lanarkshire (Scotland) town of East Kilbride, which comes only a short time after the provider’s network partner (Netomnia) began their build in the area.
We first spotted the build in East Kilbride last month (here), which seems to involve a private investment of £12 million to cover a total of 40,000 premises (homes and businesses) across the town. However, today’s announcement doesn’t clarify exactly which areas have gone live today, although we’ve since been informed that it’s Jackton.
The significance of this is that it marks YouFibre and Netomnia’s first customer in the whole of Scotland, although we expect more to follow in their other build areas of Hamilton, Irvine, Coatbridge, Cumbernauld, Falkirk, Livingston, Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy and Dalkeith in the near future.
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Ryan Battle, MD of YouFibre, said:
“I’m very excited to be connecting our first customer in Scotland just shortly after we achieved our 5,000th customer milestone. It’s brilliant to see the impact that our service is having on people’s lives. Our ultrafast internet speeds in East Kilbride will ensure households and business broadband users will be able to do just about anything they want online no matter the time of day, whilst also being able to stream in ultra-HD across multiple devices at once. We look forward to welcoming more customers on board.”
Customers can typically expect to pay from £22 per month on an 18-month term for their unlimited 50Mbps package, which rises to just £50 if you want their top 1000Mbps plan (currently discounted to £40). All of their packages include unlimited usage, symmetrical download and upload speeds, a wireless router, 24/7 UK based support, free installation, and a commitment to no price-rises when within contract.
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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I’ve been looking out for an alt net company coming to Dalkeith and this is the first I’ve seen so far so the article was a nice surprise.
Does anyone happen to know if they have a plan to build all over the town or if there would be anyway of finding out?
At present it’s listed on their tentative ‘To Do’ list, so we don’t yet have any details.
Thanks for the reply Mark.
I emailed them and they replied saying its in the planning stage but they will make their presence visible for people making orders once the spine of the network is complete.
I contacted them a couple times when they 1st announced Dalkeith about a month ago.
They can’t tell me a single postcode they plan to deploy in. Not even a rough area where they will start.
They seem to target a lot of fully ducted areas as they use PIA so who knows where they will pick.
As yet there’s nothing on the roadworks site so nothing has started yet.
Hi John.
I checked the roadworks myself and couldn’t see anything.
The spine they’re building would run from the exchange near eskbank and head into town towards morrisons I would assume?
Noticed that telewest have a lot of roadworks planned in and around the Eskbank area so maybe Virgin are gearing up to deploy around that area?
Me personally, I’m in the new kippelaw Estate and have had FTTP for a while now, all ducted as far as I’m aware so keeping my fingers crossed they’ll head out this way.
Hi Mark I stay in Woodburn. Kippielaw,Easterlangside and the top of Woodburn (Charles church) scheme is getting Virgin cabled via the existing BT ducts in the near future it’s the same down in Eskbank near the college and down iron mills. From what I have read Lothain Broadband are going to be rolling out in Dalkeith as well so in the next 5 years we will have a vast choice of FTTP broadband, it seems like there is going to be a fair amount of over building in the Dalkeith area.
Woodburn born and raised!
Openreach will also be hitting the telegraph poles of Woodburn in the next 12 months bringing FTTP to the main part of Woodburn.
It’s completely surrounded by Openreach FTTP already.
To add…
Lothian Broadband announced in January 2021 that they planned to cover 50,000 extra properties with FTTP in Midlothian/East Lothian.
They replied to me at the end of January 2021 confirming Dalkeith wasn’t currently in their plans.
When they announced last month that this was being extended to 70,000 properties I emailed the same person and they replied again that Dalkeith wasn’t in their (current) plans.
They usually do much more rural than Dalkeith.
For some reason when virgin were laying cable in the area they completely missed my estate.
They will more than likely return and cover your new builds at Kippielaw using Openreach’s existing ducts.
They are in the process of starting this at the new builds at Easter Langside at the opposite side of Woodburn.