City-focused UK gigabit broadband ISP Hyperoptic has reached a new agreement with the Hillingdon Council in London, which will enable them to expand the reach of their full fibre (FTTP/B) network to cover over 11,000 social housing properties across the borough.
The first to benefit from this agreement (we suspect it’s a master wayleave deal for access) will be 500 properties in the Northeast of the borough, with the rest set to follow. The deployment should help to support their wider plans for covering 2 million UK homes by the end of 2023 (they’ve already covered 825,000 premises and expect to add 400,000 more by the end of 2022).
As this is social housing, it’s worth noting that Hyperoptic also offers a ‘Fair Fibre Plan‘ in the form of a social tariff, which starts at £15 per month for an unlimited 50Mbps package and rises to £25 for 150Mbps. You can also add a phone service with included evening and weekend UK calls to this for an extra £3.
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James Prowse, Hyperoptic’s Regional Manager for Social Housing, said:
“Fast and reliable broadband has never been more important. It’s a utility that everyone needs to effectively work, learn and socialise from home. We are committed to bringing an end to digital poverty and giving everyone the opportunity to benefit from the ‘full fibre’ difference. Councils have a really important role to play in enabling us to realise this vision and we thank Hillingdon Council for making this rollout possible.”
End.
hyperoptic are scared of houses, so many buildings right next to me have hyperoptic, legit 2 minuets away frome me have fibre but then cant run it to houses smh
Why are fibre builders obsessed with social houses? Surely can’t be making as much profit as non-social housing?
Also doesn’t the council have more important things to be doing. I’m sure the residents can manage on Openreach’s network
Providing cheaper and faster internet should be for everyone, not just for people living in non social housing. Good on councils for making life better for their tenants, which is what they should be doing
Why should councils choose which people be awarded cheap subsidised housing and others not? That absolute discrimination.
If you cannot afford to live somewhere like London by your own means you should be forced to move elsewhere to an area that is more suited to your budget.
Housing benefit has become a total scandal in the UK, all it does is inflate costs for everyone else.
You can get a cheap 4G SIM, topup £5-10 and the JobCentrePlus site works fine on that.
Ignoring discussion on the merits or otherwise of social housing the operator can get wayleave for thousands of properties in a single agreement rather than negotiation building by building.
To gain wayleave for the equivalent private housing would require far more expensive legal work.
The tenants get access to the service, the operator gets access to the tenants and it costs the local authority nothing. Everyone involved wins.
@Bob: Because high rise buildings are generally more economical to upgrade to FTTP rather than individual houses. Most of the apartment buildings are social housing. Newly built buildings don’t usually have to sign wayleave as they have FTTP by default.
If you try to build FTTP for a building that is entirely made up of leaseholders then mostly tenants will be living in those flats. If these tenants leave and move away during their 12-24 month contract period they must move to another flat that also has that particular Altnet provider or else the Altnet will lose money as these tenants will most likely cease to pay the monthly bills when they are in a mid-contract as they won’t receive the service elsewhere!
So it is actually a safer bet to provide the service to stable residents who won’t move out all of a sudden. Council tenants are actually the most stable residents.
Existing old build social residential buildings are the only ones generally without FTTP. 96% of newly built properties have FTTP by default.
Yes, we can all manage on the existing Openreach’s FTTC network even if it were enough for our needs. But this will completely contradict with Governments ambitions to upgrade 85% of the country with Gigabit coverage by 2026.
Nice to see something finally happening in my home town 🙂
I’m with hyperoptic paying £35 per month for 1gbps speeds.
I live in social I agree social housing are more stable wont leave like a private renter so long term looks good for Hyperoptic to install FTTP in social housing.
I remember I kept on asking Virgin Media now Virgin media 02 when are they coming no updates no news etc… They mainly focus on houses now they are doing buildings slowly.
I don’t pay for Sky, Netflix, Prime get everything free just have Firestick cut my cost.