Community Fibre Launch 5Gbps Broadband for London Firms
London-focused broadband ISP CommunityFibre (CF), which has already covered 500,000 premises with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (aiming for 2.2 million by the end of 2024), today claims to have become the “UK’s first 5Gbps 100% full fibre broadband for businesses” with their new 5GIGAFAST tier.
The first thing to clarify here is that CF are NOT saying that they’re the fastest full fibre business provider due to offering a 5Gbps tier, since a number of FTTP providers can already offer packages that go up to 10Gbps for business customers (and sometimes homes) and CF themselves are one of those. But it is true to say that we don’t often see 5Gbps product tiers, since it’s more normal to jump from 1Gbps to 10Gbps in this market.
The focus of CF’s new £335 +vat per month 5Gbps package is thus to “enable businesses to replace expensive and inflexible leased lines with multi-gigabit full fibre at a fraction of the cost“, and indeed that price point is fairly attractive for such a product (e.g. Vodafone charges £610 for just a 1Gbps leased line, while Virgin Media charges £550, Hyperoptic £380 and BT’s 100Mbps – 1Gbps service is £300).
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Naturally, we’re also talking about a business connectivity solution here, which should not be compared with residential plans. In that sense, new customers can expect to receive prioritised UK support, a static IP address (option to buy more), a named account manager, 99.9% up-time reliability (backed by business SLAs & service guarantees), broadband failure backup (a 4G mobile WiFi solution) and a choice of 12, 24 or 36-month contract terms.
Graeme Oxby, CEO of CommunityFibre, said:
“We are proud to provide more broadband options for London businesses, whether big or small, with Community Fibre’s 100% full fibre network. As cloud technology continues to advance, we are determined to continue delivering higher, more reliable bandwidth speeds at the most affordable price, to ensure that London businesses aren’t left behind.”
As to whether or not CF is the “first” ISP to offer a 5Gbps plan via “full fibre” lines, well.. that’s a harder one to answer. The reason for this is that some networks offer flexible bandwidth options between speeds of 1-10Gbps, which could in theory sit at 5Gbps if you really wanted. Likewise, the term “full fibre” could these days just as easily apply to FTTP as it can to a leased line.
Finally, back in 2015/16 Gigaclear announced that they’d launched a 5Gbps package for businesses on their Oxfordshire full fibre network, although this was somewhat of a bespoke pilot product and we haven’t seen it being promoted again since. Nevertheless, it did exist.
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.
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Worth noting that Gigaclear is P2P while CommunityFibre is XGS PON. A guaranteed 5gbps service leaves a remaining 5gbps for the remaining up to 63 other users (I believe its roughly a 1×64 split on CommunityFibre).
This won’t be too much of a problem, I’d assume a roughly 30% take up rate for CommunityFibre so contention won’t be a problem though I’d expect a restriction of 1 5gbps service per PON.
This is ofcourse assuming they are guaranteeing 5gbps, otherwise its difficult to compare to a leased line. Or they might be doing an up to 5gbps service with 1gbps guaranteed.
I cant find much on the guaranteed speed, all their website says is that its not a leased line service. Bit concerning that on this page is also a 10gbps package which they can’t guarantee with other users on the same XGS PON.
They also claim that they can provide speeds better than leased lines (not true) for less (somewhat true).
Sectioning part of a PON for a business service isn’t a bad idea, CF will have loads of capacity since they use XGS PON for 1gbps lines but with 5gbps and 10gbps they could be clearer on whether its guaranteed or they can offer it during business hours when people aren’t at home using up capacity.
You know then can just add another cable right? and it’s not just one big giant cable shared by all. Yes the numbers are sort of right, but that’s just for 1 cable.
@Billy I’m aware that they can just light another fibre with a PON for a customer (assuming there is a spare one in the bundle) but then you are back to a dedicated fibre e.g a leased line.
It is also just one cable (well one fibre strand in a cable) shared by many. That strand goes to a splitter and is split between 64 customers. If there is contention problems they’ll typically try to move you a neighbouring PON if possible, if not I’d suspect they’d either charge ECCs for effectively your own PON or just say no to your order.
They aren’t guaranteeing anything as far as performance goes from what I’ve read.
Businesses on the whole are far less fixated on their broadband speeds than many residential users. As long as no-one complains and everything works things are usually left alone.
Certainly the network engineers I work with expect some variance in the services they have if they aren’t paying for guarantees so transient congestion wouldn’t be noticed as long as the PON handles it gracefully and it doesn’t trigger high jitter, latency and loss.
If a business needs, I emphasise needs, not desires, multiple gigabits a second for any length of time they probably aren’t going to be consuming it from an office, they’ll have the endpoints in data centres. The exceptions to this usually being where the office has a data centre in it or is attached to one.
They have enough fibre capacity that they could drop another dedicated PON for the business subscriber without too much difficulty
I’ve just had this service installed in our office; we ordered before it was even on the order forms, so we’re possibly one of the first takers of this service.
So far performance has been very good, and whilst as others have mentioned the bandwidth can’t be guaranteed in the same way as a P2P leased line service, the price difference makes it a good value proposition for our use case.
It obviously remains to be seen if the service “degrades” as more users in the building and on the same PON run take services, but CF overall seem pretty decent to work with so I’m confident that should issues arise they’ll work with us to resolve them.
Wahey for london then. God they get everything don’t they, and still complain. Meanwhile i’d be happy with a bus service that runs. They’ve gone bankrupt. Bet they won’t let their precious TfL go the same way.
Rest of the country, subsidising the life of the londoner.
Jesus whats wrong with u? I live in London and dont have community fibre..
We also got an utterly incompetent leftist mayor who cares more about queer day and policing twitter than the actual sky high muggings and record knife crime. I witnessed a mugging just 2 days ago where 2 guys wearing hoodies and masks just stole a phone from a girl’s hands and then cycled away
We have a customer based in Piccadilly who can only get ADSL, or else a leased line. Given they are a 2-person business, what do you think they are using to run their business? It’s bad form to suggest London get all the fast cheap internets while the rest of the country pay for HS2. It’s as much hope-and-pray, hit and miss inside the M25 as it is outside, it seems.