London FTTP ISP Community Fibre Cuts Out of Contract Prices
UK ISP CommunityFibre, which has so far covered 500,000 premises in London with their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, will today do the opposite of what most internet providers do by cutting almost all their out of contract prices. This will be particularly useful to loyal customers who are unlikely to switch.
At present the operator, which also owns Box Broadband’s full fibre network in parts of Surrey and West Sussex (here), is aiming to reach 2.2 million UK premises by 2024 – that’s more than half of all the homes in London (3.7 million).
Residential customers typically pay from £20 per month on a 24-month term (£25 post-contract) for their unlimited 50Mbps (symmetric speed) package with free setup and a free router, which rises to just £25 per month (£54 post-contract) for their 920Mbps service. The operator also offers a super-cheap 10Mbps tier for just £12.50 per month, which is aimed at those who are struggling with financial difficulties (although anybody can take it).
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However, in a rare move for an ISP these days, CommunityFibre has informed us that they’ve reduced almost all of their post-contract prices (except on the £12.50 plan). Most of the packages have modest reductions of between £1 to £5 per month (e.g. the post-contract price for 50Mbps is now £22 on a 24-month term), but their 920Mbps tier has fallen from £54 to £27 on a 24-month term! That’s a huge reduction.
The information notice didn’t include much detail and, at the time of writing, the change wasn’t yet live on their website, but this move easily makes CF one of the cheapest gigabit providers in the market, at least for those living in London. The catch is that cheaper prices also make it harder to deliver a return on your build investment, but we assume they’ve factored that in and have found that being aggressively competitive on price can work.
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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This is great but do they still do “CPI” unmentioned greed increases?
Of course. Only a tiny minority don’t.
Yes, Eeyore, and it’s not unmentioned. It’s in the contract and has to be made clear at the time you sign up as it’s a key feature.
Hyperoptic doesn’t and has about 20% of overbuild with Community Fibre. For someone not on the gig, there’s no reason to pick CF over HO just for price stability
Plenty of reasons to pick CF over Hyperoptic. Non CGNAT IPs is one of them.
CF only supports non-CGNAT IPs with 500 Mbps packages and above, no thanks to their completely non-existent technical documentation.
Stop voting for governments that inflate the monetary supply and companies won’t need to do CPI increases.
Mike I agree but there’s unfortunately not a single libertarian party advocating for not printing money and adopting Bitcoin, less govt, lower taxes, etc. If you start the party then you get my vote
I still argue that companies do not need to do mid contract increases but they do so out of greed.
Making the marketing showing the increases more prominently could be a good blow but a bigger and more fair one would be the ability to freely exit a contract if the company increases the price
“but their 920Mbps tier has fallen from £54 to £27 on a 24-month term”
Do you mean the price is now £27 *after* the 24-month term, and continues indefinitely?
If someone wanted to sign for a new 24-month term, would they still be able to get the £25 per month price like a new customer?
Either way, this is very good news. It reflects that the marginal cost of providing 1Gbps versus 50Mbps is almost zero. It just means that people can finish their downloads quicker.
This is focused on out of contract prices, so the new customer discounts still apply too, but it’s now a lot cheaper post-contract too.
Oh the infrastructure used in delivering 50mbps and 1Gbps is exactly the same. Same cabinets, same fibres, same backhaul etc. config is the only difference between the two.
It’ll be a corporate secret but I’d love to know the payback periods on their infrastructure.
I wish they were in my area
I wonder if their real cash cow is the 10GB business package.