Swish Fibre Add a Few Locations to Home Counties FTTP Build
Swish Fibre, which is building a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover 250,000 premises across the Home Counties of England, appears to have quietly added a few additional locations to their build plans – mostly catching some of those that were near to existing deployments.
At present, most of the operator’s work is being funded by investment from Fern Trading, which is backing them with a commitment of around £225m. Fern Trading is a familiar name as they’re also supporting a number of other full fibre builds from Giganet, AllPoints Fibre, Jurassic Fibre and Vorboss.
However, we’ve recently spotted (credits to Sam) a few new locations that the operator hasn’t announced before, such as the town of Midhurst in West Sussex (population of c. 5,000) and Alresford in Hampshire (population of c. 5,400). The reason for this is that both are understood to be extensions of existing builds (e.g. Alresford is an extension of their build in Alton, while Midhurst is similarly associated to their plans in Liphook).
The rollout in Alresford looks to be particularly interesting as Trooli are also actively deploying FTTP into the same area, while Openreach are doing something similar in Midhurst.
As Spokesperson for Swish Fibre said:
“We’re openly engaging with communities around our build areas to see if it’s commercially viable to serve more of these towns, as well as looking at the potential need for BDUK funding where appropriate. We have a number of examples like this and Swish has a dedicated team working on these opportunities.
All of the areas where Swish has a presence have been fully surveyed before the build goes ahead to understand how to build the network and also the competitive position on the ground.”
We’ve summarised the current list of Swish Fibre’s active build locations below, organised by region.
Swish Fibre’s Build Locations to H1 2022
Berkshire
Ascot
Bracknell
SandhurstBuckinghamshire
Beaconsfield
Buckingham
Flackwell Heath
Great Missenden
Hazlemere
Knotty Green
Marlow
Prestwood
Princes Risborough
Seer Green
Tylers Green
Wooburn GreenEast Sussex
Crowborough
UckfieldWest Sussex
Crawley Down
East Grinstead
Fernhurst
Haywards Heath
MidhurstHampshire
Alresford
Alton
Bordon
Hook
LiphookNorthamptonshire
TowcesterWest Northamptonshire
DaventryOxfordshire
Banbury
Brackley
Chinnor
ThameSurrey
Bagshot
Cranleigh
Farnham
Felbridge
Godalming
WindleshamWarwickshire
Harbury
Southam
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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Thanks Mark for a detailed article, I am so excited I cannot wait for it to happen.. We have suffered long enough here with poor broadband.
They also seem to be deploying in Billingshurst
Plausible as Storrington is going live with Giganet in September and then they are going to start to build in Pulborough.
I’d be interested to see the scale of overbuild by Alt-Nets being funded by Fern Trading
Swish fibre aren’t doing all of Great Missenden, after speaking to reps and the engineers doing the work they have no plans to cover the areas North West of the town centre. Neither does Trooli who seem to be doing small pockets of activity. My concern is that they are avoiding it as gigaclear staked their claim in that area by installing some cabinets and running a few fibre cables between them but then vanished over 2 years ago.
They’ve done the same in Gerrards Cross – looking at some coverage maps, half seems to be Hey! Broadband with the other half is Swish with pockets of BT FTTP as well. Virgin tickles Chalfont St. Peter so they’re hemmed in really.
Hey! keep advertising in Beaconsfield but have never deployed yet Swish is everywhere – the days of overbuild/fragmentation are well and truly here.
This will be one to keep an eye on perhaps – Giganet are deploying in the Winchester area so if Swish come any further west it could be the first Fern overbuild – I assume Fern are doing something on the backend to avoid paying twice!
Looks like they’ve also added (part of) London: https://twitter.com/SwishFibre/status/1543912379569905664?t=DEoVmXh4KH1Z1ZvMoY5eAQ
Gigaclear are about to start building in Great Missenden and as part of that build will apparently also be covering Little Kingshill, Great Kingshill and Hughenden Valley according to the marketing presentation, the presentation mentioned they’d be covering 1797 households
This is the trouble with the way the rollout is going.
Sprint to get some footprint and acquire customers to keep out the competition but it then leads to a very piecemeal approach.
I do sometimes wonder at it given the costs of running the fibre spine why quite so much volume is skipped. Usually because it is a bit difficult or it just doesn’t fit the business model? There is also the gia thing, of just keep moving rather than getting bogged down with interminable, costly and difficult to manage, civils.
BTW I don’t see how VM having a footprint would put off a full fibre provider? Plenty of people will jump the VM ship for improved upstream bandwidth or a more reliable connection?