ISP Lightning Fibre Launch 50Mbps Social Tariff and Tests 3Gbps
Broadband ISP Lightning Fibre, which is currently deploying a Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of Sussex and Kent in England, has today reduced the price of its entry-level 100Mbps residential package to £18 (until 31st Dec), launched a new 50Mbps (symmetric) social tariff and begun testing a 3Gbps package.
The operator, which is being backed by private equity firm Foresight (here), first began their rollout in 2019 and was initially focused on deploying across the Eastbourne, Hastings, Bexhill, Hailsham, St Leonard’s, Haywards Heath, Tenterden, Heathfield and Broad Oak areas of East Sussex and Kent (here). So far, they already claim to have covered upwards of 60,000 premises and are initially aiming to reach 140,000 (fully funded).
Otherwise, the new Social Tariff costs just £15 per month for a 50Mbps service and is only available to households on a range of means-tested benefits, on a 30-day rolling contract. The package also includes a free installation and router, but to get any of this you do need to be covered by their new network.
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The full list of applicable benefits includes Universal Credit, Job Seekers’ Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Personal Independence Payment, Attendance Allowance, and Care Leavers’ Support.
Ben Ferriman, CEO and Founder, said:
“We’re seeing target-beating uptake, even in areas where we have direct FTTP competition. We’ve increased our headcount to almost 200 direct employees and relocated our HQ to larger premises in Eastbourne to support our accelerated growth.
We’re responding to the cost of living crisis with prices which reflect good value for the consumer, at a level competitive with old copper/fibre hybrid networks. We don’t impose unfair, mid contract, annual inflationary price rises on our customers; use clear pricing; and, avoid confusing offers, so our customers can buy with the confidence that their prices won’t increase year on year. This all translates into healthy market penetration and happy customers.”
However, the social tariff isn’t the only change that Lightning Fibre has announced today. The provider also confirmed that they plan to launch an unlimited UK landline and mobile call virtual landline package, retailing for around £10 per month, in early 2023.
On top of that, they’ve also provided a 3Gbps residential service to a select few customers ahead of a 2023 roll out, with pricing expected to be in the region of £100 per month.
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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3 gig. lol oh god now the comment section will be full of “nobody needs 3 gigabit”, followed by people explaining why downloading faster is nice, only to get more nonsensical verbiage.
What happened to virgin media’s 2Gbit btw? anyone know?
lol.
BT started testing 1.8gbps in Wales last week for 4 months. If BT go to 1.8 then VM might be forced to go to 2.2gbps. VM upgrading their network in Rep.of Ireland to 10gbps now but dont know when its launched.
Half meg anyone? I remember it was said you will never need more than 500kbits
I heard that vm are looking to launch 2.4gig in 2023
The great thing about the majority of Alt-nets is they are already built for 10Gbps making them future proof and the only issues they will have is getting the backhaul to support such speeds.
3 gigabits is impressive. I’m not sure how good take up will be, probably a bit niche for now at that price and with the cost of living problem at the moment.
Lightning Fibre may also need to upgrade their capacity at LINX and LONAP too.
Got a gig connection , literally seen no benefit to my household even when the latest games come out its slow to download as the servers the otherend just cant give me what i need .
Will be downgrading for a few years. 3GB maybe good but lets see how useable it really is
Jason.
By any chance is your games console/pc fitted with a mechanical hard drive? On our xbox one we only got maybe 100-200mbit max, but when we upgraded to xbox series x we now download at 800 mbits. Its probably your equipment not up to date. I have BT 900 and download games at near full speed (usually 500+meg).
My PS4 Pro wasn’t any faster over Wi-Fi as the built in chip sucks but with Ethernet it uses the full 1gbps available.
My gaming PC will use the full gig over it’s AX Wi-Fi card with pretty much all services.
As like with most tech problems, the issue is between the chair and the device.
pc gamer, 950 meg connection here and I get the full 100MB/sec from steam no problem. Also from hetzner 10Gb speed file. But I have a firecuda NVMe in my system. The above comments about disk speed are right. A single magnetic spinny disks are not going to be able to write much higher than 500MB/sec if you’re lucky. And some of the older SSDs top out around there too.
I have a basic Crucial 2TB SSD and it can get the full 112MB/sec so I can only dream what a NVMe can do for general file transfer
Wonderful 3Gbps, when will enough be considered enough? I know 10Gbps is being considered but does the average household really need 10Gbps or even 15Gbps?
1Gbps should be more than enough for the average household, non residential use though I understand a need for 1Gbps to 10Gbps.
So what are you suggesting? Speeds should be capped based on the person with the lowest needs?
I read on this website a couple of weeks ago someone said 500 meg was all you need. I dont agree as my nephew downloads all his games onto his console as its quicker than disc loading times. 500meg is half the speed of gigabit so games would take up to an extra half hour to download. And if you have a games pass that equates to hours more waiting. I am doing my best to stay at gigabit with high prices and will go to 2gbit if it comes out. If you dont need gigabit thats ok but there are people that use it, like many people on this site.
No Mike, that’s not the point at all. What Guest was trying to say and they do have a point here is when will speeds be considered fast enough for the average household?
As to K, are you seriously suggesting that every household needs a minimum of 15Gbps or more just to save time downloading the latest video game?
I used to use Virgin’s 100Mbps service and that was capable of downloading the latest video games in 90 minutes or less so I fail to see why its so important to have a 2Gbps connection or more just because little Mark is impatient to play the latest GTA game.
In all seriousness, the operators have to reach a bar of which THEY believe is reasonable for all, what some of you people seem to forget is the average speed is capable of so much before we start entering “my one is bigger than your one” territory and we start seeing silly needs for even faster speeds.
1Gbps is more than enough for the average home regardless of what it’s used for and 3Gbps to 10Gbps should be aimed at purely commercial users who have a more demanding need for a reliable and fast connection than the Jones at No 92.
There are simple rules in life. People that are negative/losers tend to criticise and look to the past. Successful people/winners look forward to the future and think of possibilities. Truth, which one are you?
If it took only 90 mins to download a game at 100meg that means the game was only up to 54gigabytes in size. It shows that you ‘used’ to be a gamer as games can now be over 120gb in size easily. Patches are over 20gig themselves. That means on VM 100meg games would take well over 3 hours to download. Dont blame me, you are the one that said it. Do you really think gamers wouldnt want faster than 100meg if it takes hours to download at 100mb when they can pay for faster?
Time doesn’t stand still. As long as tech innovation continues, the need for bandwidth will increase.
to Truth.
As has been clearly said there are people that use 1gig and faster. Cloud computing/gaming anyone? K was making a point that there are good uses of gigabit. At no point did K say people use it solely for downloading games. If you use Photoshop you need as fast as possible currently to apply filters as you need really fast uploads to keep your sanity. If nobody needed 2gig then why is it coming out? You need to expand your horizons as to what people use ultrafast for.
I have moved ALL my gaming to the could because with 1Gbps down and up – no real reason to have clunky HDD’s and slow transfers anymore. That’s a good reason to have faster speeds.
Also there is something about uploading a video faster than YouTube with it’s mammoth servers can process it.