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.

“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.