WightFibre Build FTTP Broadband to 40,000 Isle of Wight Premises

Broadband ISP WightFibre, which is busy building a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover around 78,000 premises on the Isle of Wight by the end of 2023 (South Coast of Hampshire, England), has announced that they’ve just hit the 40,000 premises passed milestone (up from 35k in Feb 2022).

The operator, which is being backed by private investment from Infracapital, is currently investing a total of around £94m into their deployment across the island (including £9m from gigabit vouchers). On top of today’s milestone, fibre optic cables have already been laid to a further 10,000 homes (these are not yet live, but they should be ready sometime this “summer“). 

This means WightFibre’s “Gigabit Island Project” is now well over the half-way mark, with a total of 460km of trenches dug to date. The company currently expects service to be available to 60,000 premises by the end of 2022 and to 75,000 “homes” by the end of 2023 with an ultimate target of around 80,000 premises. This is 96% of all premises.

However, the operator will face some competition from Openreach’s rival FTTP build, but at present their rollout plan only seems to be focused on the west side of Cowes. By comparison, WightFibre’s network is already live in big parts of Cowes, East Cowes, Newport, Wootton, Ryde, Lake, Nettlestone, Seaview, Sandown, Shanklin and Ventnor, but they’re about to go live in Freshwater and Yarmouth. Work is also ongoing in St Helens, Bembridge, Brading and numerous other locations.

John Irvine, CEO of WightFibre, said:

“We are really pleased to have connected our first full-fibre customers in Ventnor and Seaview. We expect the network build across the Island to be largely complete by the end of 2023.

Our new full-fibre, future-proof network is second to none on the planet and this, coupled with our very high levels of customer care, is giving customers what they want – fast reliable broadband that just works.

Customers of the service tend to pay from £22.95 per month for a 100Mbps (symmetric) speed package on a 1-month term (includes free installation, Mesh WiFi and a router), which rises to £54.95 for their top 900Mbps tier. The operator also offers a Wi-Fi Guarantee (guarantees a reliable connection in every room or get £100 back) and a Speed Guarantee (guarantees the headline speed, upload and download or get £100 back).

Sadly, the provider didn’t include an update on their customer figures, but we know that they had a connected base of about 10,000 in February 2022 and that will no doubt have continued to rise.