Pine Media Brings FTTP Broadband to 7,600 Flats in Sheffield
ISP Pine Media, which is slowly building their own gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across parts of South Yorkshire, Kent and rural Derbyshire (they also sell products via Openreach‘s rival network), has revealed that their full fibre network now covers over 7,600 flats/apartments in Sheffield.
“Alongside our rollout to houses all across Sheffield, we have also been busy connecting flats/apartments (MDUs), which are often trickier to connect due to complex wayleave and internal cabling requirements. Today we have just passed 7,600 flats/apartments in Sheffield with our Full-Fibre network!,” said the provider.
The announcement marks the first time that we’ve seen a solid build update from Pine since 2020. Back then they were aiming to cover around 30,000 premises with their FTTP network by the end of 2020 (here), before potentially rising to 50,000 in the future. But the latest independent data from Thinkbroadband estimates that the operator has so far covered 20,801 premises.
Advertisement
Customers of their GIG broadband plans typically pay from £21.99 per month for a 40Mbps (10Mbps upload) tier on a 12-month term with free activation, which rises to £40 for their top 900Mbps (symmetric speed) service.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« VX FIBER’s Stoke FTTP Rollout Hit with £2460 of Fines in 1 Week
Jurassic Fibre Bring 10Gbps UK Broadband to 90,000 Premises »
Great to see Pine Media making progress, but I’d take the numbers from ThinkBroadband with a pinch of salt. For some reason Andrew seems to pick up future areas (or in the past Openreach reselling) as live footprint.
Pine Media are live in Worrall and have customers, however the TBB map shows Wharncliffe Side and Oughtibridge as live. Both of those show as taking pre-orders on Pine Media’s website. I’ve seen no sign of their build yet there, just VMO2 expansion. A lot of the Openreach cables are direct buried and from the VMO2 work I suspect quite a few of the OR ducts are full or blocked.
When you spot something that TBB might be missing, then please point it out to them so that their database can be updated.
@Mark Jackson – Don’t worry I do let them know. Andrew normally sorts them quickly but I know some networks/providers are a challenge to track
Agreed, his numbers are wildly incorrect for pine, mostly he seems to be picking up openreach areas as pine media
At least they’ll install fttp in apartments unlike open reach who run a mile at the thought of installing fibre in even a ground floor apartment.
Openreach are fine with MDUs, it depends on whoever runs the building and how difficult they are with openreach.
@alex a
Not my experience at all. The management company provided permission for the work to take place and open reach wouldn’t do it. The fibre cable has already been run as far the BT manhole cover which is less than 2 feet from the wall of the apartments. Open reach said all they had to do was drill from the manhole to the wall (less than 2 feet) and them when it came time to do the job they said that was too much work and refused to do it. My property still shows as being eligible for fttp as do all my neighbors but open reach won’t do the work.
They won’t just wire one apartment they’ll pre-wire the entire building. Unsure why they accepted an order or show availability besides that for some reason they don’t have you listed as an MDU.
Pine are in Oughtibridge, I’ve seen them cabling on haggstones, birks wood and down church street!