Lit Fibre CEO Shares His Perspective on the UK’s Full Fibre Market
The CEO and Co-Founder of alternative network ISP Lit Fibre, Tom Williams, has today – as part of an exclusive interview with ISPreview.co.uk – provided a progress update on their UK roll-out of a new gigabit-capable full fibre broadband network and shared his perspective on the current market.
The new provider, which began building almost a year ago and is being backed by an unspecified equity investment from Newlight Partners LP, is currently deploying a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover various towns in several of England’s counties (e.g. Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Worcestershire, Essex and Suffolk).
The total number of homes being targeted by the operator, in towns already under deployment, is over 200,000, which feeds into their ultimate aim of covering 500,000 homes by 2026. “We are now building in 16 towns concurrently with 5 to be added in the coming months. This will then mean we are building in towns with a total of over 500k homes … the output of our build is [now] approaching 10,000 homes passed a month,” said Tom.
Tom himself is no stranger to all this, having worked in the industry for nearly 20 years. He was at the reputable ISP BE Unlimited, during the early days of copper line unbundling (LLU), and later took over as MD in 2009, after O2 bought the company. More recently he was also part of the founding team at urban full fibre provider Hyperoptic, which was one of the UK’s first gigabit speed ISPs for consumers.
“In 2020, just as the Covid pandemic was starting, I began thinking about starting my own fibre company to further extend full fibre to smaller urban areas in the UK. My first call was to co-founder, and ex-Hyperoptic colleague, Ben Bresler who was just as excited as me about the prospect of starting a company of our own,” said Tom. The result was Lit Fibre, which is said to adopt “more of a community focus.”
Suffice to say, we were keen to learn more about Tom’s approach with Lit Fibre and his perspective on current developments in the wider market.
The Lit Fibre Interview
1. Lit Fibre is a very young alternative network, albeit one that has already set a bold ambition to cover 500,000 UK homes by 2026 with a 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network. Work on this started last year and some areas have already gone live.
Can you share with us a general update on your current build progress (premises passed etc.) so far and how much coverage you hope to have achieved by the end of 2022 (calendar)?
ANSWER:
Our build started in Chippenham March 2021 and we launched service in the town soon after in July. The build there is now nearing completion. Over the last 12 months, we have grown considerably from our initial trial area to where we are today. We have demonstrated our long-standing credibility by following build announcements with live service available very soon after.
We are now building in 16 towns concurrently with 5 to be added in the coming months. This will then mean we are building in towns with a total of over 500k homes. We have fantastic build partners, and the output of our build is approaching 10,000 homes passed a month. For us, a home passed means we have a CBT fully tested on a pole, or at the end of the lead in from your house. We will be talking more about where we’ve got to later in the year.
2. As the former COO (until January 2019) of another very well-known alternative broadband network provider, Hyperoptic, what made you decide to make the big leap from doing that to building your own full fibre network via Lit Fibre, and how have you found that transition?
ANSWER:
As mentioned in the intro, I left Hyperoptic in 2019 and spent some time out finishing the renovations on my house and taking a well-earned holiday with the family. It had been a long time since I was on holiday without my laptop!
Hyperoptic was an amazing experience with great people and I am really proud of what I achieved during my time there. Dana was a fantastic mentor to me and we are still good friends.
I wanted to take the opportunity to continue rolling out full-fibre to the UK with more of a community focus. Lit strives to really embed itself within the local towns and become part of the fabric of local society. Starting my own company (after a little break) was always my dream job and I am loving every minute.
3. What were the biggest challenges in getting a new AltNet like Lit Fibre off the ground and into the deployment phase, and do you have any tips for others who are currently going down the same road?
ANSWER:
The biggest challenge is building the right team, first and foremost. Building fibre networks is not easy and the market here isn’t awash with talented people looking for work! Luckily, we have been able to attract exceptional talent into Lit.
Having investors that are experienced in the fibre market, and the UK in particular is a real advantage. Ben and I have worked with them for many years which means that we know and trust each other well and we can get on with delivering our network.
Systems and technology are also critical enablers, making sure that these areas receive the right investment from the start is important.
Finally, getting the right build partners that can deliver to stringent quality standards can be a challenge. In such a busy market it can be tricky to find the right partners, who are as committed as we are to delivering an excellent quality network for our customers.
4. Such a large build, if fully realised, could cost several hundred million pounds – depending upon how challenging your build locations are to reach. But so far very little information has been released about how much investment has been committed to the project.
We’re aware that Lit Fibre has received an equity investment from Newlight Partners LP and has allocated about £33m in shares since its inception, but can you tell us how much total investment the project has managed to attract and how much funding you think might be needed to reach 500,000 premises?
ANSWER:
The precise details of our funding remain confidential, and we only draw down on the full investment as we need it but as you can see from our progress we are growing quickly. We are in the nice position of having enough funding to deliver on our targets and have no current plan to raise additional finance. However, if we see an opportunity to go bigger or faster we will always examine how best to accomplish that from a funding perspective.
Please click over to page 2 to read the final part of this interview..
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.
« ISP RunFibre Name 3 More Gloucestershire Villages for FTTP Rollout
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5538)
- BT (3518)
- Politics (2542)
- Openreach (2300)
- Business (2267)
- Building Digital UK (2247)
- FTTC (2045)
- Mobile Broadband (1978)
- Statistics (1790)
- 4G (1669)
- Virgin Media (1625)
- Ofcom Regulation (1467)
- Fibre Optic (1396)
- Wireless Internet (1392)
- FTTH (1382)
Very interesting. All of a sudden we are getting all these alt networks popping up, which is good for competition, certainly if they knock a few customers from out of reach, but I do worry about their future. As was said in the article, fibre broadband costs a lot of money to get off the ground, they need to get a certain amount of customers just to pay back the loans and investments. If there is an open reach fibre in the same place, and someone is on say Talk Talk FTTP, which is on the open reach FTTC network, then they have the choice of going to the Alt network or stay with Talk Talk and moved onto openreach FTTP. Why would a person move to alt network if they had the choice of staying with the ISP they are already with on FTTP?
Sure, I know that once Zzoomm sort out their problems, their network is more advanced than openreach, but it would make little difference to the majority of people or me to be honest.
That will be the same for any Alt networks.
The other thing is, you go to an Alt network and then get into financial difficulties and is sold to another network, worse case being Talk Talk.
Competition is good, I like competition, but I fear there is not going to be enough customers to keep all these networks going.
“Sure, I know that once Zzoomm sort out their problems, their network is more advanced than openreach”
“The other thing is, you go to an Alt network and then get into financial difficulties and is sold to another network, worse case being Talk Talk.”
I’m not sure any PON provider could be described as more advanced than another, the only limit to the bandwidth is the Equipment you put at each end of the Fibre and you also have the ability to offer higher bandwith bespoke business connections, on different wavelengths, in tandem with standard GPON services.
It seems to me, many of the Altnet builders are building to sell the infrastructure once built. You constantly read the word consolidation in interviews such as this, suggesting much of the investment is a bet on selling the network to a bigger player down the road. Scale is important in Telecoms, and many of these Altnets will possibly struggle to cover ongoing operational costs in a truly competitive market. As far as consolidation is concerned, much will depend on integration and ongoing operational costs for any interested larger player, looking at buying the smaller Altnet, things like backhaul costs, compatability between network management systems, Engineering resource, etc, etc, will decide if a takeover is feasible. Many of the smaller, rural, geographically isolated Altnets may not attract a bigger player and simply go bust with the customers migrated onto Openreach.
@Ex Telecom Engineer: Your zeal for Openreach is admirable, but altnets do indeed often provide superior features. To name just a few important ones:
– symmetric fibre
– IPv6 support
– static IP address
– better customer support
– availability (Openreach simply won’t touch many small-town or rural areas)
IPv6, static IPs and customer service have nothing to do with Openreach so I’m not sure why you’ve listed them as differentiators. Obviously you can only subscribe to the service that is available to you, but Openreach as a result of being the largest network also have the largest rural coverage.
“@Ex Telecom Engineer: Your zeal for Openreach is admirable, but altnets do indeed often provide superior features. To name just a few important ones:”
I’m just pointing out that, in my opinion, Rural Altnets wont be able to compete on price, since scale gives the bigger players a competitive advantage. I disagree with everything you stated in your post:
“– symmetric fibre” Whether, or not, to supply a symetric service is purely down to provider choice. As I pointed out DWDM allows multiple services to share the same Fibre, so BT could provide a GPON service to a residential street, and also provide 100Gb symetric service to a business customer over the same fibre in the same location, as could any provider, should they choose to.
“– IPv6 support” IPV6 isn’t really necessary, since NAT has adequately allowed IPV4 addressing schemes for years, even since IPV6 was envisaged. According to Google IPV6 is available on BT, and has been in the majority of cases since 2016.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2016/11/bt-broadband-lines-now-support-ipv6-internet-addresses.html
https://www.m0lmk.co.uk/2021/12/11/bt-fttp-ubiquity-usg-ipv6/
“– static IP address” I think that one was answered in the IPV6 reply above.
“– better customer support” Openreach deal with the CP’s, not the residential customer. BT customer support has apparently improved dramatically in recent years.
According to Choose co uk
“BT customers are the most satisfied overall, with 88% saying they are satisfied with the service offered by their provider.”
I removed the link for the above quote, as this is my 2nd attempt to reply to GNewton, with my first attempt showing as moderated and then disappearing, I’ve removed the link in case that was the reason.
“– availability” Clearly that’s wrong.
“Otherwise, the operator’s main event continues to be their £15bn investment to deploy – via Openreach – a new full fibre broadband network to reach 25 million UK premises by December 2026. Some 6.2 million of those will be in rural or semi-rural areas.”
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/07/bt-results-see-full-fibre-grow-by-record-of-763000-uk-premises.html
GNewton you should be more specific, since everything you’ve stated is easily contradicted.
The comment on symmetry is the one legitimate criticism. CityFibre sell their wholesale customers symmetrical residential services. Most altnets sell symmetrical residential retail services. Openreach sell a ratio of at best 6:1 and at worst 8:1 on residential products.
Openreach’s customers can’t just light a wavelength on Openreach fibre they buy the products Openreach sell. Dark fibre to residential addresses at sane prices not being among those products.
Given Openreach continue to sell nothing but GPON as far as ‘broadband’ services go it’s reasonable to describe their FTTP network as less advanced than companies using XGSPON.
Everything else is obviously nothing to do with the network provider or is simply wrong.
Above on ratio should be at best 4:1. Apologies for typo.
@Ex Telecom Engineer, Zzoomm offers symmetric fibre, they can also do up to 2Gb/s if that is what people want, useful for business I suppose, but at nearly £100 a month out of reach for most people 🙂 Zzoomm uses XGS-PON, I have had a read about Pon and the differences, not being a network engineer there are some things I don’t understand, but I get the gist of it.
sure, fibre is fibre, it is the equipment connected to it that makes the difference, even I know that.
I mean fibre is fibre for what we are on about, I realise the fibre that I used to connect my Blueray player to my sound bar is a bit different, in quality.
so yes, Zzoomm networks knocks the spots of Openreach, but does anyone really care? the selling off is one of the things that bother me, Matthew Hare who is the founder and Chief Executive of Zzoomm used to own gigaclear and yet for some reason decided to sell that and set up another fibre network, so yes, that is a bit of a worry if I decided to go to Zzoomm.
To be honest, I hate Openreach, too big, too much influence and have had too much money from the taxpayers, also it is not possible to deal with them directly, and they belong to BT, which is a massive company again with far too much power. When I got off Openreach network a few years ago to go to a wireless network, I was so happy, I was so annoyed when it all went belly up and i had to come back onto the Openreach network.
That is the other reason why I am a bit bothered about going for fibre, certainly on a Alt network, because they may go belly up. Price is the thing as well, but to be honest, Zzoomm prices are not bad compared to others.
£33 a month for the 150Mb/s up and down, Talk Talk is £32 for 150 down, I have no idea what the up speed is.
If a Alt network does go belly up and none takes them over, all that fibre in the ground doing nothing.
Clearly the Altnet fanboy Force is strong on here. If you read my wording carefully and follow the links I provided, nothing I said was incorrect. Most users don’t require symmetric service, and Ad47uk it’s the terminal Equipments that determine Symmetric service not the Fibre. I used to work in DWDM Transmission, so I’m well aware of what’s possible in relation to utilising multiple Wavelengths; As I stated in my post, should BT wish to add a 100GB symmetric channel over the same Fibre as a current GPON service, it’s as simple as adding equipment, via splitters, at the exchange and customer site; As long as the equipment wavelengths don’t interfere with the GPON service and vice versa, both will work simultaneously. If BT don’t offer a particular service, it’s because they choose not to, probably because it isn’t needed by the majority of customers. Most potential FTTP residential customers aren’t interested in whether their connection is symmetric, or asymmetric, as long as they can do what they need to do, and GPON provides an adequate service for 99% of uk households; Businesses will probably be offered some sort of symmetric service, by BT if needed, probably with better SLA’s, levels of service, and a higher price point.
“@Ex Telecom Engineer it’s Sunday – go get laid dude – i am sure your underage boy can take it 8 times in a week.. saddo”
What’s that about angry man, is there something wrong with you? You should see a Psychiatrist urgently “dude”, you clearly have problems.
I was going to discuss some more but after that geniunely disgusting comment aimed at you I’ll leave it, Ex-telecom. Sorry you were on the receiving end of that.
@Ex Telecom Engineer, you may be right that most people don’t require symmetric service, but then do most people really need broadband 150Mb/s and over? I know families that have been using broadband of around the 37Mb./s area for years and don’t have any problems. Sure, their games may take a bit longer to download or that film they downloaded may take a bit longer, but they still get it in the end. If they get impatient then maybe they need to step back to dial up days 🙂 I know full well it is the terminal equipments that determine Symmetric service not the Fibre, fibre is just a glass tube that light travels down, it is the electronics that does the work. Openreach goes for the cheapest available technology and say that will do, I am not an Alt network fanboy, but I do like to support the smaller companies if i can afford to. A few years ago when I had a different job, and I was on ADSL, I used smaller providers, sadly I don’t have that luxury now.
I am glad there are alternatives, even for a small city like this, I just hope people will use them and not go straight to openreach network.
As for Angry man, I have no ideas.
@Ex Telecom Engineer:
Your reply clearly shows your BT bias here, as is evident with your note on customer satisfaction for BT. In reality, users see it differently, see e.g.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/isp/bt/?category=17
or
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/btbroadband.co.uk
And if it was that easy for an Openreach-based ISP to offer symmetric fibre broadband, then why don’t they, unlike many altnets?
Of course, Openreach only deals with CPs, not with end customers, I never said anything to the opposite.
I’m not sure why people are quoting static IPs or IPv6 as an altnet “feature”. That’s layer 3, so nothing to do with Openreach and everything to do with the ISP themselves. BT themselves of course already do have IPv6 enabled across their network, and they offer static IPs to business customers, let alone what the other Openreach ISPs may provide.
Going to an alt net may well make it worse, if it’s a new ISP with hardly any IPv4 address space and so needs to use CGNAT.
Openreach will sell whatever their CP customers want. If there was meaningful demand for symmetric service, they’d do it. Cityfibre and others have it because they think it is a differentiating factor, and they’re safe knowing that few of their customers will actually try to use it.
As for coverage, small towns etc – who’s doing more than Openreach to serve those places? Places that have never had competition already (ie Virgin) will probably never see an altnet, so it’ll be once again down to Openreach to do the areas that aren’t ultra profitable.
Good luck to Tom Williams and Lit Fibre, thank you for coming here and answering a few questions.
This is rather like it was when cable was deployed. There was a lot of money pumped into the deployment which left a lot of companies in financial strain. There is overbuilding which in the urban area isn’t going to diminish, and that will start to push out into smaller towns as time goes on.
As with the cable networks, there was amalgamation. This will happen with the alt-networks as funding dries up, or people decide on other networks. There have already been a few casualties and I’m sure more will go under over the next few years.
Have you ever thought about the huge amounts of money involved and why CEOs keep moving either their teams of spreadsheet jockies.
They are paying themselves an enormous salary and for what digging trenches and promoting a service that normally works on loosest cost wins.
Look at the reason, and what value is overbuild, look at the ceo of gigaclear to zzoom, flomatic to ogi, and the list goes on , what value do the board level bring, they know how to filter millions through, and would you guess they start themselves on 250k plus, time to wake up everyone ftth is a money filteration service, I met a man last week from island who has earns 21k in a week on a mini digger giving his Bert 120 a day, soft verge with a ditch witch, guess who owned the equipment. Wake Up
it is intersting how Openreach suddenly see areas where alt nets are being installed
Most Alt nets at presnt are having to work hard just to service the debt, higher interest rate increases will not help. Few if any are paing down the debt
Yep, not so long ago Openreach full fibre was only in a couple of roads here and was like that for a couple of years, now Zzoomm have got going here, Openreach seem to have woken up and gone mad, with one of the estates having a huge coverage already. Strange how Openreach seems to wake up when they have competition, before that they had little interest.
Reminds me of BBC local radio, had no interest here until a commercial radio station came.
@Ad47uk: I have seen similar situations in some nearby small towns. After an altnet (Lightspeed Broadband and LitFibre) started putting in fibre in areas which had no Openreach-based fibre, all out of a sudden Openreach started doing the same thing. Before it wasn’t supposed to be done till 2025/26 by Openreach, now there is the rush to put it all in as fast as possible. In fact, just had a chance today to speak to some Openreach engineers who were working on some fibre runs, who confirmed it.
Gnewton where is this @Ad47uk: I have seen similar situations in some nearby small towns. After an altnet (Lightspeed Broadband and LitFibre) st @Ad47uk: I have seen similar situations in some nearby small towns. After an altnet (Lightspeed Broadband and LitFibre) started putting in fibre in areas which had no Openreach-based fibre, all out of a sudden Openreach started doing the same thing. Before it wasn’t supposed to be done till 2025/26 by Openreach, now there is the rush to put it all in as fast as possible. In fact, just had a chance today to speak to some Openreach engineers who were working on some fibre runs, who confirmed it.
Just as easily find areas where altnets are building and openreach are not building. Given the size and scale of of openreach plans its hardly surprising they are going to trip over each other occasionally. Most of openreach plans are published with a long lead time giving altnets opportunity to get in there 1st
Fastman: please enough. It’s both obvious and sensible that Openreach would target areas where they’ve altnet competition.
The business case to roll out FTTP when you’re only competing against yourself is a bit thin. The business case when you’ve a competitor wanting to take your customers from you suddenly gets way more compelling.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Openreach doing this. It’s both good business and expected to deliver on the company’s duty to shareholders.
an engineer
really , Openreach have a very specific roll out plan updated at each quarter (wich advance notification for where the next 2 quarters are), the areas that lightspeed / and lit are operating are have no not been updated by openreach (so should not be in any near plan. not sure who you are !!! but have I extensive experience and understanding of both roll out plans especailly the openreach (probably more that you do) which is why i asked G newton the Question as this seems odd !!!
@Fastman: Where does Openreach publish such specific fibre rollout plans? The website at https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/where-when-building-ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband is quite vague, you’ll often see areas marked as ‘To be built between April 2021 and December 2026’, which is pretty useless. Regularly checking roadworks.org often gives a clearer picture, as does talking with Openreach engineers who actually know what’s really happening on the ground.
I doubt the engineers will know where they will be working the day after tomorrow.
But if you are building fibre somewhere it is a pretty safe bet that you will not be alone. Be that Openreach, Virgin, CityFibre, Altnet or a combination of.
@GNewton, I never realised that out of reach have put fibre in so much of this city until I was checking some things out as I read and heard that Out of reach would be another couple of years at least. Zzoomm have certainly made out of reach move their backside, which is a bit of a shame, I had hoped Zzoomm would have had more of a head start to get customers. I presume Zzoomm must have looked into that building a fibre network here is worth the risk, even with competition, or that they had a load of money given them to do so. To be honest, I would not risk it in this city, it is full of older people and a lot of them will not bother about fibre.
Gnewton
as i said its quite detailed if you understand the roll out and you understand how you build FTTP networks and the leadtimes to build it and you know what to look for
@Fastman: You still haven’t provided your sources for the rollout plans. I guess it’s not publicly available? End customers can rightly expect telecoms to let them know when certain services will become available. It’s a shame telecoms can’t, or won’t. This is not just the case with BT/Openreach, but also with a few altnets, such as Lightspeed Broadband etc.
You can make all the claims you want @Fastman but where is the evidence to back it up?
Yes, Fastman, really.
If I owned shares in BT Group and they weren’t doing this I’d want to know why, however it’s as obvious and transparent as you could want to see that they are. Time after time after time CityFibre / Netomnia / A N Other altnet / whomever rock up and Openreach are surveying and starting build within months having not published any plans for those exchanges previously.
If the resources are already there, which they are, it’s not a massive leap to think that Openreach can and do move those resources around and change their focus. If the business is so lacking in agility that it can’t change priorities altnets are the least of its worries.
Aside from anything else altnets putting in PIA orders should get Openreach’s attention, and the altnets proving out Openreach infrastructure and repairing blocked ducts should immediately improve the business case to deploy.
I’m aware of the lead times to build from end to end. They’re irrelevant here. Openreach will be aware an altnet is surveying, they’ll have the requests for the network maps. Then they get the PIA orders starting to come in. It might take months to build FTTP from start to finish, it definitely doesn’t take months to start the process and some steps can be done in parallel. Perfectly possible to be installing new OLTs at the same time as performing the surveys or indeed the actual build in the field. Even with potentially long lead times on OLTs no reason to not be upgrading power and cooling if necessary, alongside building out the access network while waiting for the headend to be ready. Unless the existing OLTs are ECI-only or have no spare line card slots, unlikely, at least some premises can be brought live without too much work in the headend.
The point is to get FTTP built in time to give your CPs an opportunity to retain as much business as possible and for Openreach in turn to retain as many live customers as possible. Openreach should be able to build faster than any altnet and in the case of CityFibre, Virgin Media and some others way, way faster as those guys do a fair amount of civils building spine and some distribution.
I’m sure it doesn’t happen every time at every exchange but it most definitely does happen. There’s nothing wrong with this: it’s how it should be. I’m not sure why you’re so defensive about this. BT Wholesale did it with ADSL, Openreach are doing it with FTTP.