Jurassic Fibre Cuts Price and Extends Full Fibre in South West UK
Exeter-based broadband ISP Jurassic Fibre, which is constructing a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural parts of South West England (Devon, Somerset and Dorset), has announced that their network has now started to go live in the towns of Crediton and Dorchester.
The operator is currently being supported by an investment of £250 million from Fern Trading Limited, which is helping to fuel their ambition to cover 350,000 premises across the region by the end of 2024 (here and here). In terms of progress, back in January 2022 JF claimed to have “connected” over 30,000 premises (pretty sure this means premises passed) to their full fibre network, but by March 2022 that had jumped to 75,000.
JF’s new network has already gone live in various towns and villages across the South West of England, such as Exmouth, Honiton, Barnstaple, Sidmouth, Yeovil and Okehampton, among others. The latest to join that list include Crediton in Devon and Dorchester in Dorset, with more on the way.
Sarah Howells, Chief Customer Officer at Jurassic Fibre, said:
“We are delighted to have surpassed 75,000 premises in our network expansion and to go live in Crediton and Dorchester, providing many more homes and businesses with an ultrafast, full fibre broadband they can trust.
As a local company, we recognise the needs of local communities and have made significant strides to bring the South West into the 21st Century for advanced connectivity. This latest milestone is a credit to the hard work and dedication of our fantastic Jurassic Fibre team and I hope it demonstrates our commitment to leveling up the digital infrastructure of the region with the rest of the UK.
In recognising the fantastic work we’ve accomplished so far, we look forward to the future as we continue to expand our network and support local communities by making reliable, ultrafast broadband a reality for many across the South West.
75,000 homes is a huge step towards our goal to connect over 350,000 traditionally hard-to-reach premises, and we can’t wait to bring advanced connectivity to even more people across the region.”
Homes on the network can take a 150Mbps (30Mbps upload) package from just £17.50 per month on a 30-day (monthly) contract term – this includes a router and free standard installation, which rises to just £40 per month if you want their top 950Mbps (200Mbps upload) tier. But this offer pricing, which was announced in March, is listed as coming to an end on 30th June 2022.
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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Interesting that they’ve been digging up the roads here in Newton Poppleford, but Openreach went overhead and their network is already live with several customers. Not entirely sure how much return JF will get!
In one of the large towns JF cover BT don’t do FTTP except for business and its FTTC 76mb price is £35pm with a 24 month contract. Needless to say I have ordered the £17.50 deal and its only a 1 month contract.
Bye Bye BT now you dont need a BT connection to watch Sky
Blimey, just found out Jurassic expect fibre to be available to me by the end of May. In the words of Victor Meldrew “I don’t bloody believe it!”.
@Adrian Hopton, we already have Openreach FTTP, so won’t be moving over to JF if it becomes available, yes JF may have 1 month contracts, but you don’t get the choice of ISPs like you do with Openreach.
From the current prices I’ve seen nobody(Openreach ISPs) comes remotely close to a 950/200Mb package for £40/month on a 30 day rolling contract. In the longer term Jurassic will have to consistently undercut Openreach, in towns where both have networks, to remain competitive. I’ve heard very good things about their customer service, competitive pricing and very good customer service is the Amazon recipe for success.
@Flip3000 fair enough! I mean it’s not like we can easily move over to Jurassic anyway when we already have an overhead fibre drop cable and kit provided by OR, unless that would be removed by JF?
Plus, it’s £100 not £40/month for 900 Mb/s with JF
Whoops, just realised that’s the offer price, normally it’s £100. That’s not bad!
I imagine they would simply install a second drop and ONT, with you leaving the unused ONT unpowered (potentially) for future use.
Not sure we’d want two fibre drops, that could look “interesting”, haha!
Hopefully they will be in Tiverton soon, Openreach & airband are installing in all the roads next to ours but dont seem inclined to install as it would mean using a mini trencher or something similar as we are fed from poles apparently no ducting exists or can be used.
If you are fed from a pole, then your line will likely be OH or DIG (Direct In Ground), if your copper is DIG then you’ll most likely get an OH fibre drop, unless you’re willing to provide ducting.
Many thanks William apparently my line is DIG, would be very grateful for a fibre OH, i have a fault on line also but as i am out of contract & do not want to renew incase of fibre arriving they wont repair it unless i renew contract.
If you’re fed from a pole fibre will come from the pole unless there are issues. Do you mean that there are poles further down, but that you don’t connect directly to a pole? The copper could be running on carrier poles and then go into the ground to be delivered DIG.
DIG areas will eventually have microducts built to them for FTTP. That’s what Openreach have been doing in other areas, it’s just later on in the rollout than areas with ducts and usable poles.
Standing new poles has been rare, only replacing them with poles to carrier higher load has been a thing in any quantity. New poles by altnets have been a thing and are used situationally.
@An Engineer, Openreach didn’t offer to put microducting for our FTTP installation, they said we’d have to provide the ducting. OH isn’t ideal, especially as it took quite a while to get used to aesthetics-wise, but it works! Openreach have installed poles in many areas locally where there’s either no ducting or the ducting isn’t usable for various reasons.
If they can keep the prices that low, I’ll join when my current contract ends. I’m not paying the full price of nearly £100 a month for 900mbps though.
Exactly. £100/month for 900 Mb/s is a bit pricey, IMO!
The cynic in me suspects that Jurassic list “pizza pricing” — i.e. a “list price” which in reality nobody pays as everyone has some form of discount. Agree that £100 is a steep price to pay for broadband!
Jurassic have been clearing ducts and pulling fibre all around Teignmouth for several months. They seem to be working alongside OR & Community Airband in the town. Some areas seem to be live except the mid and central town areas, where we are.
Going by Devon roadwork info and talking to some of the civils teams I come across, those areas suffer badly from blocked and damaged ducts, that’s certainly the case for our immediate area where the duct that leads to our group of buildings has collapsed next to the concentration point ( iirc thats the name of the things) nearby. The team that discovered that told me that the part to replace the damaged “connection to that chamber” was not available… no further info, weird situation. It’s a 1960s duct carrying copper that works AOK. Needless to say all progress for us has halted.
So nothing happens quickly!
Last I heard Jurassic supply a near 100% locked down router, a Nokia G-0104G-Q – they control it not you, can be set to Bridge Mode but you have to request it. CS may be responsive but they don’t like answering questions about the supplied router in my experience.
Yes, you have to contact CS in order to even change the SSID, madness! They said that they’re working on an app to be able to do this, though I would think just unlocking the interface would be a much better option. A lot of IT technicians (myself included) would want to be able to access the router rather than use an app!
When I spoke to sales they indicated the engineer would set up bridge mode during the installation if that is what you wanted.
We went with JF in March this year, and are generally happy, except for the nonsense with the locked router – it is currently sharing Channel 11 on the 2.4GHz band of our neighbours network, causing interference and dropouts. It would be simple to change the channel and eliminate the problem if I had access to the router.
Typical, here in Yeovil once Jurassic started to build OR started to overbuild and Gigaclear have just anounced their roll-out. It never rains but it pours :-).
Now I have a choice of FTTP, except I’ve recently renewed with Plusnet when Jurassic couldn’t give me dates for when I could sign up. A week after I renegotiated a 12 month contract with Plusnet Jurassic rang to say they’d gone live in my area – bummer.
If they keep the prices I’ll sign up at the end of my current contract on the 450Mb for £22.
Interestingly Jurassic are single-homed to Lumen (née Level 3). IMO this is somewhat alarming as being single homed to a tier one ISP leaves Jurassic vulnerable to peering disputes.
Longer term I wonder what Fern Fibre’s strategy will be with respect to upstreams and peering. Instinctively I’d suggest that Vorboss has the strongest network (peering at 11 IXes across Europe) and therefore Jurassic / Giganet / Swish ought to upstream via Vorboss (à la Virgin Media / Liberty Global) — although it would be good to see Cogent removed from the transit blend.