Axione’s Full Fibre Rollout to Reach 30,000 UK Premises by Q1 2023
London-based Axione UK, a subsidiary of French provider Axione that is investing £300m to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to 4 million UK premises, has confirmed to ISPreview.co.uk that their initial build is “on track” to cover 30,000 premises by the end of March 2023.
The operator, which is targetting both sub-urban and rural areas, started their rollout earlier this year (here) and initially began by building around the seaside town of St. Andrews in Fife – partly by running their fibre optic cables via Openreach’s existing cable ducts and poles (Physical Infrastructure Access). As we reported last month (here), they’re now targetting a total of 35 locations, albeit mostly in Scotland.
Axione’s website similarly confirmed that their initial build plan for the aforementioned 35 towns and villages would see related services becoming available progressively between now and the first half of 2023. The good news is that the company has now been able to provide us with a solid indication of their initial coverage targets for 2023.
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“We are actively building in 4 key PoP [Point of Presence] areas: Stonehouse, Shotts, Cupar and St Andrews and are launching build in Newport-on-Tay and Helensburgh. The other areas are being planned and will be launched progressively,” said Axione’s Head of Business Development, Jean-Donan OLLIERO.
Overall, Axione UK said they’re currently “ramping up delivery and are on track” to cover 30,000 premises (live) by the end of March 2023, which will then be followed by 175,000 by the end of 2023.
The first target looks achievable, although it’s a bit too early to judge their second goal, but we assume they’ll be making heavy use of PIA (existing cable ducts) in order to hit that. It is fairly normal for a new operator to spend the first 1-2 years of build slowly ramping up, before really starting to make rapid progress.
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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If only there was some way for the public to see if it was available to their address.
Or will they be a provider who says town built and we all just have to take their word.
Exactly as @AndrewFerguson says..
There should really be some way to scrutinise, planned (or already deployed) FTTP deployment from Axione UK, to check if its indeed sub-urban/rural areas that has been targeted or not.
They should target South Wales all the way through the M4 corridor past Swansea…
My feeling is that Axion will be gobbled up in the next big wave of M+A’s of FTTP Altnets by one of the big 2 OR/VMO2..
Are they offering symmetrical FTtP packages i wonder?
They are currently building on our town where Virgin Media has just gone Live and Openreach have been building for over a year
Have had a look at one of the providers that use them 900 download and 300 upload but limited to 400GB day time usage on there fair use policy which is crazy
Hi Stewart. Which ISP are they using there?
I think scotnetfibre is on of their ISPs: https://www.scotnetfibre.com/
Will be Scotnet according to there website
Hum, why does an altnet focused on Scotland get the mildly derogatory “albeit” as in “albeit mostly in Scotland”, as if that was an issue? Looking at all the news articles for other altnet’s which are focused south of the border get the same treatment. Can I presume it is the standard little Englander brigade out in force that seems to be the norm for this website? Before anyone says anything I was born and bred in England.
Seriously?
The company is called Axione UK which implies UK wide coverage. Would you object if the word Scotland was replaced by (say) Yorkshire?