F&W Networks Secures Funding and Extends UK Full Fibre to 185k Premises
F&W Networks – supported by UK ISP Hey!Broadband – has today announced that they’ve secured “significant” new funding from Foresight Group and claim to have covered 185,000 premises (up from 150k in July 2022) across the South of England with their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.
The Altrincham-based operator, which holds an aspiration to cover over 1 million UK premises by 2025, is currently deploying their FTTP network across parts of several counties including West Sussex (Horsham and Southwater), Oxfordshire, Greater London, Buckinghamshire (Gerrards Cross, Chalfont Saint Peter, High Wycombe and Beaconsfield), Hertfordshire (Hemel Hempstead) and Surrey (Godalming) etc.
The good news is that, after securing a significant £25m funding package from Santander in July 2022 (here), F&W Networks has today announced that Foresight Group LLP have also completed a significant investment into the company. Sadly, they don’t state how much funding is involved, but it’s apparently enough to help “accelerate” their rollout toward delivering on the aforementioned target.
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Carlos Bock, Executive Chairman of F&W Networks, said:
“We are extremely pleased to announce Foresight’s investment in F&W Networks; this endorsement by Foresight is a significant testament to the management team and the Company. We are focussing on delivering next-generation digital infrastructure in the UK, and this partnership, with Foresight’s infrastructure investment capacities, will provide us with the ability to rapidly scale our roll-out.”
Residential customers can expect unlimited packages that cost from £23 per month for 100Mbps (50Mbps upload) with free installation (inc. WiFi 6 router) on a 24-month term (currently discounted to £18), which rises to just £43 for their top 900Mbps (symmetric) package (currently discounted to £29). Hey! also pledges no mid-contract price hikes.
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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I know it sounds like a cliché but I have been with them since early March. I have to say beside a few glitch they been amazing. As you all know not everything can be fantastic and there is always room for improvement in case you are in the area and you want to know more.
The Good:
I know it is fiber, and i know it is suppose to be great but this not only Good but excellent. I am currently on their 950Mbit and its been rock solid and testing the connection on a regular basis i do get 105-110Mbit /sec. Yes this is absolutely crazy.
Once connected you will truly enjoy a fantastic service which keeps delivering as they promised.
The are improvement:
– Installation, While the individuals were nice and did help me with the installation location, they did manage to break my toilet roll (by accident of course) and they did provide me cover for it. Yet still the wholes were a bit armature like.
– No admin
This is so important, their router does not give you access to the admin account. You get a guest access which is a very generic password which again you can’t set or change. This from security is very poor (ADSL provides used to do that back in the days).
– Poor Wifi
The built in wifi in the router is pretty poor. Again I would encourage them to look at the router, or allow for their customers to choose a different router.
Summary: Once everything is setup, it is fantastic service and it just work at very high speed. No downtime whatsoever. For now very happy customer.