Open Fibre Networks Ltd ISP Boosts UK FTTP Plans to 900Mbps
A little-known internet provider called Ashford Fibre has just become the first ISP on Open Fibre Networks Limited‘s (OFNL) open access UK full fibre broadband network to launch a gigabit-class 900Mbps package for residential customers. Most OFNL providers previously only offered up to 360Mbps for homes.
The Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network that OFNL builds is usually ordered by consumers through their wholesale partners, which includes ISPs like Direct Save Telecom, Seethelight and others. The company is part of the wider Brookfield Utilities UK Group (BUUK), which includes utility infrastructure provider GTC.
The operator typically only deploys their network to cover new build home developments and is estimated to have reached more than 50,000 premises, although OFNL itself has not released an official figure or set any clear targets for future coverage. As a result, they remain somewhat of a minor player in today’s market, despite being one of the longest running full fibre operators.
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However, until now the fastest residential full fibre package that OFNL based ISPs offered was 360Mbps (75Mbps upload), which is naturally not very competitive in today’s market where 1Gbps is the new top tier for everybody. But at the end of last year we noted that OFNL were upgrading their backhaul links and some feedback indicated that speeds of up to 1Gbps would become possible in 2022.
The good news is that Ashford Fibre now informs us that they’ve introduced both a 500Mbps (150Mbps upload) and 900Mbps (180Mbps) package on OFNL’s network, which cost from £51 and £54 per month respectively – that’s very cheap for the top tier. The service is also free to setup, when using your own router, but you can optionally pay £50 to get a pre-configured router from the ISP and all plans are on a short 3-month contract term.
Robin Jobber, Ashford Fibre Director, said:
“We are pleased to be able to offer these new higher speed packages, we know they have been sought after by many of our existing customers. Initial feedback from customers we have already upgraded has been very positive and we look forward to assisting others in making the most of their broadband potential.”
The ISP informs us that the new speeds are “not available to all sites” covered by OFNL yet, but “upgrades are rapidly being made” and the operator’s availability checker has apparently been updated to show the maximum speed available to a particular site. This may help to explain why some other ISPs have opted to wait a bit longer before launching the new tiers, but they’ll need to follow soon or risk customers switching away.
If moving from another provider, Ashford Fibre said they do not charge any migration fees, however they warn that not all routers available can handle the additional speed efficiently, so in some cases a new router may be required. Overall, it’s good to finally see OFNL catching up to the rest of the market.
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The news follows the recent deal with Virgin Media (VMO2), which enabled Virgin to deploy their own fibre into OFNLs ducts at both new and existing sites (here). But with VMO2 rapidly upgrading to harness XGS-PON technology, OFNL will need to keep one eye on the future too in order to avoid losing out on competitive balance.
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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In this day and age of 10gbs operators, it’s about time the upto 1gbps operators on FTTP were at least symmetric and not holding back upload speeds.
Yet again another poster who’s assuming EVERYONE needs assymetric speeds based on their own needs.
Operators will only offer symmetric speeds on FTTP when you can’t live without them. Which you can at present.
*should say symmetric in first sentence, not asymmetric.
That’s not true Steve. You’re correct in saying that not everyone needs it but that’s not the reason they don’t offer it, the installed hardware is more than capable. Would it hurt the 90% of people who don’t want a faster upload speed if they did have it? No, of course not, but there’s far too much money to be made from the remaining 10% who do want it…see below.
The reason is that Openreach do not want to impact their own leased line sales, which costs a damn sight more than conventional FTTP and does offer symmetrical speeds.
The only way Openreach will offer faster upload speeds is when they are forced to. This will likely happen in 2 ways imo. 1. Virgin Media finish their upgrade to Docsis 3.1 on their upload channels and increase their FTTP footprint. 2. Altnets (which tend to offer symmentrical speeds) gain enough coverage/market share that Openreach are forced to respond.
@Zen
Yes £300 a month for me – and it’s only 100mbps
@Anna
Exactly! And that’s why I bought the 900mbps package, to get the 100mbps upload. I’d far rather have 500/500, or even 500/250, but they won’t offer that until they have no choice.
It’s funny that the O in Ofnl stands for open, yet their ducts are not open for leasing. That would solve the low speeds issue more quickly
The O for Open means any provider can provide a service via their network
Access to ONFL’s ducts is available to anyone prepared to negotiate for it.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/09/virgin-media-o2-uk-extend-broadband-to-older-ofnl-sites.html
The ducts are open and Virgin Media are using them.
Apparently this is fake news? I literally just contacted OFNL and the reply was
“OFNL do not provide duct access to ISP’s and the announcement relating to Virgin Media is for them to use OFNL Fibre.”
@John. Obviously we don’t know the contract details of OFNL and VMO2’s agreement, but I suspect by this they mean some of their fibres (there can be several in a cable) have been leased or sold for VMO2 to harness as their own. The outcome for consumers is the same. There may also be different approaches between new sites and existing sites.
Thanks for the quick reply Mark. Just that leasing a fibre in a cable isn’t the same as being able to freely use the duct just like Openreach PIA as some people were implying, which makes a world of difference where their network has old tech
As I say, we don’t know precisely what approach has been taken, for that I’d need to get past sales/PR and talk with an engineer. But on the face of things, VMO2 saying it’s “a dual lay network, with separate fibres laid in a single duct” does seem as if it ‘might’ conflict a bit. I say ‘might’ because marketing people could still spin that to cover a leased fibre too.
For VM to provide their services the fibre has to connect to VM’s VHUB. However the agreemnent is announced the fact is that VM will use OFNL’s ducts. It’s an implementation detail whether that fibre belongs to VM (most likely I would think) or is leased to VM.
Steve, I must be imagining other operators then that offer symmetric at cheaper prices than this operator then??? Netomnia anyone. Look them up, they are just one!!!!!
In reply to you Steve, and ironic, another person assuming people don’t want it, just like when BT assumed and said nobody needs faster than FTTC originally…..
1. Wrt to other operators offering symmetric speeds on FTTP at cheaper prices, this will be a commercial decision based on their costs (eg backhaul), profit levels. You really need to speak to their bean counters to understand their reasoning rather than speculating wildly.
2. BT/Openreach never ever said that FTTC speeds would be enough forever. FTTC was always a stop gap to full fibre and its main aim was to bring fibre closer to peoples home whilst offering a nice uplift from ADSL2+ speeds (24 Mb/s > 80 Mb/s), and done relatively cheaply and quickly. Likewise at present, no-one is claiming 1 Gb/s speeds on FTTP will be enough forever.
Another thing Steve, in a cloud world, why wouldn’t you want fastest upload? You do realise cloud storage spaces where it’s even part of operating systems and people would like the fastest copying times to and from cloud. That’s one example. Another is if you have Emby or Plex, you may want faster upload for full bit rate streaming. Here’s another, you might run your own server or email. The list goes on. Not all services have to offer fast upload, but some choice from an operator is better and seeing as this is new infrastructure and other operators already offering symmetric more cheaply too, I rest my case.
What case are you resting? Steve said that people are assuming that *everyone* needs symmetric speeds while most don’t need them. Meanwhile your case is that symmetric is better than asymmetric.
While symmetric is of course better, your examples are for the >1% of users while Steve is referring to most people who aren’t hosting plex or other servers and whose cloud uploads are in the seconds even on Openreach’s 100mbos upload. For most people price and reliability are far more important than upload.
You’re again wrongly assuming everyone has the same needs as you.
Whilst I believe in symmetric upload, most alt-nets actually do provide the option in their business packages.
Every tos for residential packages that I’ve read say that you shouldn’t host a service using it which makes sense.
They have dedicated links to CDN’s thus greatly reducing backhaul traffic and costs.
They can’t do the same for a service you may host and thus would incur additional costs.
This is one of the reasons why business packages cost more.
Errr no. You are incorrectly assuming that nobody wants faster uploads.
It was explained perfectly clearly and the fact other operators offer symmetric, some asymmetric but faster uploads too and cheaper.
Just in case you missed it, here’s just ONE operator netomnia with up to 10gbs symmetric or for most people, services 1gb or less but with symmetric upload
This is new infrastructure. No need to happen what a number of people would want. A lot of people are leaving Virgin Media when Altnets come along because of slow upload speeds as been quoted on their forums.
To use your argument is akin as I said to BT trying to tell everyone that FTTC was fast enough and nobody needed faster than that, despit the extra reliability of FTTP compared to FTTC too….
did you offer to pay bt Or arer you referring to Openreach for the FTTP instead of the FTTC
“You are incorrectly assuming that nobody wants faster uploads.”
Where did I mention that? I said not EVERYBODY needs faster uploads. Big difference.
Re ‘A lot of people are leaving Virgin Media’ this a link to VMO2’s Q2 2022 results which shows that fixed line broadband customers are *up* by 8000 year-on-year.
https://news.virginmediao2.co.uk/2022-financial-results/q2/
I would prefer symmetrical upload, its better to have more bandwidth and not need it than have not enough when you do.
I agree I’ve gone from FTTC to 1Gbps and being able to upload 390GB an hour if needed is much better than struggling to do 3.9 – even if I don’t need it most of the time.
All my gaming is now in the cloud – and finally i can use Google Drive for what it’s there for.
Wouldn’t go back – not a chance!
FASTMAN, wouldn’t touch BT FTTP with a bargepole.
Scandalous how much tax payer money gone into BDUK because BT tried to flog a dead horse with FTTC when FTTP was an option at the time but they didn’t want to research how to implement and chose a cheap solution where they thought they could sweat copper for another 100 years, but the argument was about what BT said originally about FTTC being fast enough and no need for FTTP with regards to opening comments where Steve appeared to shoot down higher uploads then tried backtracking with gunf about “most people”. I’d already covered that off by saying to have options or service plans where those that want it, can at least pick it rather than NO option.
There is ZERO excuse for an FTTP network from anyone (excluding Virgin Media as they are mostly HFC and have limitations wit that) to hamper upload speeds and not be symmetric. Even if you don’t allow symmetric, they should have options for symmetric service plan offerings OR a much higher upload cap speed.
As I said from the outset, ALTNETS are offering 10gbs up and down, so they should all be able to offer plans with at least 1gbps up and down. Not 1gbps down and paltry upload speed caps. Its not old infrastructure, its NEW they are putting in!
What a load of old guff. Go back to reading the Daily Mail/Daily Express.
You know that BDUK funding was often match funded by BT? Also that the fibre cables from the FTTC cabinet to a headend (the really expensive bit) are shared with FTTP so little money is wasted.
BT always planned to move to FTTP, it was originally included with their deal with ECI to have something like 25% FTTP. ECI was also decided due to its ability to have both FTTP and FTTC. BT cancelled FTTP due the very long install times of original deployments and FTTC being able to achieve fast speeds for the time.
JM-Johnson, your quote is also out of touch. Operating systems have cloud storage and getting closer to being default. You are thinking of yesterday speeds and not strategically.
“There are business packages” – true, but they are skewed to BT trying to suck as much money out of people as possible by limiting residential packages even after tax payer subsidies via various programmes. Going back to ADSL, should FTTC and FTTP have only been business packages then because they were much faster? A residential person having a server is likely to be low volume and not a data centre. Why should it even matter if they don’t require business SLA on uptime? If its their data why shouldn’t they be able to access remotely whether its Plex/Emby or not? If its a commercial service that’s different and that normally requires uptime and redundant/resilient links.
This is why the UK is way down the league table for broadband speed compared to countries thought of as third world. They are thinking strategically and with some future proofing. Unfortunately some companies in the UK want to do the minimum and then charge us again to change it.
And that’s why some of the ALTNETS shine. They are thinking of future proofing for some time ahead. Netomnia rocks for example, a good example to some ALTNETS that are capping upload speeds on their 1gbps packages and offering no options even for a package without a cap.
To be fair, many of the altnets aren’t up to appropriate standards either. They may offer symmetric speeds, yet go for a CGNAT-type service, making even simple things like running your own server, or even simple things like a CCTV camera, a real pain.
and also, operators could limit concurrent connections to a residential service with some will rather than simply limit the upload capability so this business package thing trotted out is nonsense; its based on old fashioned yesterday thinking as I said in a previous comment. You can still give people upload bandwidth and limit number of concurrent inbound connections.
I can only assume some folk work for BT or an ALTNET where they limit upload speeds to defend it, but accept that’s an assumption…
They already do, in a quiet way – I was having major issues hosting anything on BT until I disabled the hub’s firewall, because it was interpreted as a DoS attack. Something to bear in mind if you are on one of the higher tiers and expect to be able to do more with the upload than just a few large files to Dropbox.
However “check availability” on their website says I can only take 300Mbps. Also I am wondering if others selling via OFNL will offer symmetric 500/500 or 900/900.
The article says that availability will be limited to those sites that OFNL have upgraded, so presumably yours hasn’t been just yet?
If you look through their other options they are all symmetric, so it’s likely a restriction on what profiles OFNL allow for use that’s stopping a symmetric 500/900 connection as well.
several OFNL ISP’s are now offering 900Mb services
Just been in contact with See The Light and their CS received an email today about it being offered from tomorrow (site upgrade depending)
Does anyone know the rollout plan for the OFNL upgrade? Seems bonkers that the only way to know is keep checking for incidents in the hope that one occurs in my area.