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KCOM Extends UK FTTP Broadband Network to 300K Premises

Thursday, May 26th, 2022 (12:01 am) - Score 2,104
KCOM-Outdoor-Engineer-Installing-FTTP-Box

Hull-based ISP KCOM, which is busy rolling out a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire (England), has reported that their service now reaches over 300,000 premises across the region (up from the c.250,000 at the end of last year) and they’ve also got 150 wholesale partners.

The Hull-based network provider has also announced that the number of customers using services provided by other ISPs – via their wholesale full fibre platform – has increased by 60% to more than 5,000 in the past 12 months, although they haven’t offered an overall total. This still represents a small slice of their total broadband base (direct KCOM retail and wholesale), which reflects around 140,000 customers.

Just to recap. KCOM previously invested £85m+ to spread FTTP across their core network patch of c.195,000 premises in the Hull city area. Soon after that the operator was acquired by Macquarie Infrastructure for the hefty sum of £627m (here) and in early 2020 they began a large £100m network expansion into more competitive areas of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (here), which continues today.

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KCOM CEO, Tim Shaw, said:

“KCOM Wholesale provides a great platform for other ISPs to sell their services across Hull, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, giving a greater range of choice to the end consumer. I’m delighted to see our wholesale business is going from strength to strength and constantly bringing onboard new partners to make this happen.

This shows how, by working together with resellers, everyone can benefit – from our partners accessing our world class infrastructure, to their end customers who receive great products delivered over one of the best networks in the UK. Among the partners using our network is everyone from quality local ISPs to national, household-name, telecoms giants.

And the fact that the numbers of customers using services delivered by our partners has increased by 60 per cent in a single year shows there’s a huge demand for different services from alternative providers creating choice and competition in the market.”

The biggest challenge for KCOM going forward is that a number of alternative networks are now actively starting to overbuild their own FTTP with rival infrastructure, which may eventually force KCOM to offer much more competitive pricing in even their traditional safe haven of Hull (so far most of their discounted rates have only been offered in recent network expansion areas – where rivals often already exist).

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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7 Responses

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  1. Avatar photo Liam says:

    Just East Yorks and Lincs? They’ve also been rolling out across Selby for much of the last year – that’s very much in North Yorkshire.

  2. Avatar photo James says:

    And still overpriced!

    Not sure why they’re entering areas were you can get better value for money.

    1. Avatar photo Alex A says:

      Agreed, they are too expensive on their higher packages and they also have too many packages.

      30/5 – £29.99
      50/15 – £24.99 with £1 per gigabyte
      50/15 – £34.99
      50/15 – £44.99 – 12 month (rest are 18 month, yes that includes the pay per gigabyte one)
      100/30 – £39.99
      175/50 – £44.99
      300/75 – £49.99
      400/80 – £54.99
      500/100 – £59.99
      750/150 – £65.99
      900/180 – £69.99

      Meanwhile most providers seem to be going with a Fine/Fast/Faster/Fastest with say 65/150/500/900 which is a lot easier for the average consumer to decide from. £60pm for 500 is very high when most all charge less than that for 900.

  3. Avatar photo Miken says:

    It is usually around this time of year that they refresh packages, as the article mentions it is going to be interesting if they do anything pre-emptive to combat the several Altnets rolling out with symmetrical packages.

    As they always have KCOM have a large number of packages (9 – they aren’t all listed on the website, see pricing.kcomhome.com) ranging from £30 – £70 mostly with inconsequential speed upgrades so that they have £5 upsell options, they do offer slightly better upload speeds than BT but the top package standard pricing is £15 more.

    Hull Fibre via MS3’s network is £30 – £45 (+£5 for 12-month contracts).
    Pure Broadband via MS3 is £28 – £46 (+£2 for 12-month contracts)
    Connexin’s network is similar at £37.50 – £50.
    A concern with switching to any of them would be whether they use CGNAT.

    With KCOM I seem to get a bit of packet loss 8-10pm, shows up on TBB BQM and measurementlabs reports as retransmissions, I think Battlefield shows packet loss and latency variation warning icons.

    1. Avatar photo James says:

      Yeah CGNAT! It’s something I’d take into consideration before using any other provider

  4. Avatar photo Trevor Dickinson says:

    Waste of time I have been without internet for 8 weeks kcom customer service is terrible all you get is we are looking into it looks like I will have to go back to the old way so much for KCOM TECH

  5. Avatar photo Luke Harrison says:

    Signed up in April, not only did they miss the installation date by two weeks, but ever since then my connection will drop for a few seconds, at least three or four times a minute. Had three engineer call outs and yet the problem is still on-going. Thought they’d be the saviours round here as the old copper lines are terrible, but apparently not. Been told it was a fault on the street until, all of a sudden, I was told it wasn’t and nobody else on the street was having any issues.

    Can’t say I recommend.

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