ISP Voneus Trial Gigabit Wireless Broadband in Rural Durham UK UPDATE

Internet provider Voneus has just completed their first trial deployment of a new Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband technology in a rural Hartlepool village – Dalton Piercy (County Durham, England), which they claim can offer gigabit broadband speeds to local homes and businesses.

The village of Dalton Piercy is not a new location for Voneus because they had already deployed the previous generation of FWA technology in the community, which could offer download speeds of up to around 5oMbps. But adapting that to deliver gigabit speeds (1000Mbps), which also made use of some existing council-owned infrastructure (they haven’t said what), is quite an impressive development.

The catch is that the local newspaper report on this contains hardly any useful information, such as in terms of deployment cost, service price, premises passed, network technology, radio bands and so forth. Nevertheless, such speeds have previously been achieved by using mesh wireless technologies in the 60GHz band, and thus we suspect that may be the case here too.

Apparently, the upgrade only took just over one week to complete, although that’s not too surprising because much of the underlying physical network and backhaul links would have already been present from their original network.

We put one of the village’s postcodes through Voneus’ checker, which showed packages starting at £34.99 on a 24-month term for symmetric speeds of 250Mbps and rising to £59.99 for 900Mbps. The packages included free installation and a router, as well as 1-month of free service. Pretty good.

Francesca Lee, CCO at Voneus, said:

“Many rural communities are not deemed to be commercially viable to the big broadband providers. We exist to change that, making the impossible possible for communities across England and Wales by lighting up their streets and villages with ultrafast broadband speeds even if fibre networks aren’t available.”

Elsewhere, the ISP currently has a “near term” plan to cover 100,000 homes in rural areas with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (here), although they last year claimed to have “identified” a total over 200,000 premises that could potentially be upgraded via either their FTTP or FWA solutions. But they’ve still got a way to go.

So far Voneus has covered a total of over 10,000 properties across more than 25 counties in England and Wales, which is up from 7,100 a year ago, and they were planning to reach 20,000 by March 2023.

UPDATE 14th Feb 2023

As expected, we’ve been informed that the new network is based on the cnWave 60 Platform from Cambium Networks using the 60GHz band. This also means that, as well as being capable of gigabit speeds, they can now reach every premise in the village, which they weren’t able to do with the previous network.

Data usage on the new Gigabit network almost doubled with the average monthly usage reaching 425GB (GigaBytes) per household versus 227GB per household on the previous 50Mbps FWA network. A new video has also been uploaded to showcase all this.