ISP WightFibre Starts Transitioning Fleet to Electric Vehicles
Broadband ISP WightFibre, which is currently deploying a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across 80,000 premises on the Isle of Wight (South Coast of Hampshire, England), has started a programme to switch their vehicle fleet to electric (inc. hybrid electric) with the arrival of several new cars and vans.
A number of UK network operators, with the biggest one being BT (Openreach), have already begun to adopt electric vehicles and WightFibre is no different. The operator, as part of efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, has committed to achieving an “all-electric fleet” by 2026 (the company’s electricity is also being purchased on a green tariff).
The process for this transition started in 2021, and they recently received their first vehicles – 2 full electric and 4 hybrid electric vans. Judging by the pictures, the cars they’ve received are based on the first-generation Kia e-Niro series, which tends to cost upwards of £32,000 – usually coming in both a regular and long-range version (bigger battery). No pictures of the new vans were shown, so we’re not sure what they’ve gone with for those.
We suspect their EVs will probably work quite well on the Isle of Wight, since it’s entire land area is only about 380.7 km². The operator currently expects their rollout of full fibre broadband to reach 60,000 homes by the end of 2022, with the remainder now due to be completed by the end of 2023 (78,000 premises).
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 Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
« BT Seek Delay to UK Deadline for Removal of Huawei’s Telecoms Kit
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your comment content, display name, IP, email and / or website details in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
NOTE 1: Sometimes your comment might not appear immediately due to site cache (this is cleared every few hours) or it may be caught by automated moderation / anti-spam.
NOTE 2: Comments that break our rules, spam, troll or post via known fake IP/proxy servers may be blocked or removed.