ISP Cambridge Fibre Build FTTP Broadband to Wilbraham Village UPDATE

The rural Wilbraham (Great Wilbraham and Little Wilbraham) community in Cambridgeshire (England) is celebrating today after an alternative network ISP, Cambridge Fibre, was able to successfully rollout a multi-gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across the village.

We haven’t heard much from Cambridge Fibre since they deployed a new full fibre network across parts of Cambridge and Ely a few years ago (here), but since then they’ve continued to slowly expand the reach of their fibre and have now managed to enter the poorly served village of Wilbraham.

The development was only made possible after the Wilbraham’s community came together, canvassing to get enough of the government’s Gigabit Vouchers to allow building work to be completed, although it’s unclear how many premises have been reached and at what cost.

The community also sits in numerous conservation areas, thus the operator couldn’t install traditional green cabinets and instead had to get creative by deploying a series of underground cabinets to limit disruption. On top of that, they also harnessed some of Openreach’s existing infrastructure (PIA) in order to run their new fibre.

Parish Councilor, Sam Dhaliwal, said:

“The connectivity was very slow in the area before and would regularly drop out. After the work Cambridge Fibre completed we have had virtually no issues at all, there’s been no issues with the speed and it’s been very stable.

The disruption caused by Cambridge Fibre whilst they were doing the work was non-existent. They used the existing infrastructure so people were pleasantly surprised by the lack of disruption.”

Customers of the service pay from £24 per month for a 100Mbps (10Mbps upload) package with an included router on a 24-month term, which rises to just £49 for their top 935Mbps (900Mbps upload) service. The prices appear to be discounted for the first 12-months of a 24-month term, but the website makes it difficult to know what the post-discount prices are for their plans. Installation is usually free with a voucher, but can range from £125 to £225 (one-off) without.

UPDATE 11th Nov 2022

Cambridge Fibre has informed us that over 450 premises have been covered by the new network, which runs for a distance of 14km.