Hyperoptic to Build Full Fibre to 400,000 Extra UK Premises in 2022
City-focused gigabit broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which is currently embarking on a new plan to cover 2 million UK homes by the end of 2023 (they’ve already covered 825,000 premises), has today announced that they’ll invest a further £200m to help cover 400,000 additional premises during 2022.
At present the operator’s network can already be found in parts of 57 towns and cities, with 230,000 customers connected and over 1,800 staff. Most of their deployments stem from connecting large residential (MDU) and office buildings, although they’ve also been branching out to reach individual housing (SDU).
The plans announced today, which will see Hyperoptic lay more than 1,500km of new fibre during 2022, will see them connecting many more types of buildings to their FTTP / FTTB network, including terraced houses, maisonettes, converted houses and detached properties. This will involve making much greater use of Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles (Physical Infrastructure Access) than they had done so far.
Planning for this latest network extension has already been completed to commence rollout in Fulham and Pimlico, Willesden Green, Holloway, Hackney and Balham and Clapham. Future plans are also said to be “well progressed” for locations such as Peckham, Surrey Quays, Catford, Walthamstow and Islington.
Aurélie Canales, Hyperoptic’s Chief Transformation and Major Products Officer, said:
“Over the last couple of years we have scaled the processes needed to expand our full fibre network – ensuring we deliver a great installation and customer experience. We are very excited to continue accelerating rollout and bring future-proofed connectivity to even more communities.”
Customers of the service typically pay from £25 per month for their unlimited 50Mbps (5Mbps) upload package on a 24-month contract term (currently discounted to £20), which rises to £60 per month for their top symmetric speed 900Mbps plan with free activation (currently discounted to £35). You also get an included router and free activation.
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 and Linkedin.
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Interestingly it appears that they exclusively deal with Openreach for duct access — when I highlighted a duct network which runs between Crawley and Brighton they weren’t interested…
Any rumours about any rollouts in Brentford/Ealing?
Seems an obvious urban area, but so far there is just patchy Virgin media (that isn’t even consistent along streets where it is present)
@Ben – who owns it? PIA is well defined.
Even bt are being bad atm thay done all these streets around Me then one next to me then jumped over us even thow were all in the plans there slow at what there doing if thay did all that that quick what’s the hold up now
Hyperoptic wouldn’t be interested in duct that long. They connect buildings, not towns. They rent bandwidth and/or wavelengths to connect areas. 30km is a long fibre run for the sake of connecting a few buildings in Crawley and Brighton.
@CarlIT – I think you might be wrong — my contact at Hyperoptic said “we will not buy resold fibre as it effects our end user SLAs (Response, Downtimes etc)” when I suggested they could use one of the CNI resellers such as Zayo.
If I’m honest I neither know what a CNI is or what they mean by ‘resold fibre’.
They can lease direct from Neos, Virgin Media, and a very few others but if they’re trying to suggest they use their own fibre outside of metro areas that’s absurd.
If the person was suggesting they use their own fibre for MANs and then buy backhaul that I can certainly believe.
The SLAs thing doesn’t make sense. Their SLA on business broadband is next working day, their SLA on leased lines the standard 5 hours and they use Openreach tails for most premises to deliver those.
Okay Ben I understand.
So they do purchase CNIs/tails: they sell leased lines with Openreach tails.
They also purchase NNIs: they lease the capacity their core network uses.
Their fibre is the stuff in between buildings and the stuff to get that ring or daisy chain to the backhaul, usually at an Openreach exchange.
Maybe the guy misunderstood your question? Appreciate you can only go by what you are told but the idea they’ve their own fibre connecting places as diverse as Edinburgh and Southampton seems crazy.
I believe they’re saying that they have PIA / their own ducts getting them to those places. They could’ve had duct access if need be, but that wasn’t good enough. I agree that it sounds like a totally unsustainable model, and perhaps that’s why they’re falling so far short of their build targets.
Distinct lack of streetworks anywhere apart from linking buildings and getting to the local backhaul provider. If they were digging a core network there would be tons and it would take years, if they were using PIA there would be a fair amount of digging and it would take years.
I would suggest they have a multiservice edge router capable of routing, switching and PON OLT duties in a rack at the Openreach exchange. They have a Cablelink to a meet-me chamber outside the exchange and from there PIA fibre to the switches in their FTTB served buildings and to splitters for their PON customers. The buildings can be in a ring, the PONs on a star.
From the exchange Openreach EAD, Neos, VM, Colt, whomever either to the next town or city on the list or straight to whichever datacentre their core lives at.
Whatever they tell you Aled, don’t get your hopes up too much. They’re fond of saying they’ll be installing soon, but have no intention to do so. Unless you have a high proportion of neighbors interested, they won’t install.
Your 100% correct been waiting for them for ages to come up hear but nope only a few buildings were i live have it there a waste of space
Buildings are their specialty. I’m sure the folks being served by them in those buildings disagree with their being a waste of space.