LightSpeed Broadband Gets New Chief Technology Officer
Lincolnshire-based UK ISP LightSpeed Broadband, which aspires to build a full fibre (FTTP) network to 1 million premises across the East of England by the end of 2025, has continued to create a new management team by appointing Chris Tagg as its new Chief Technology & Information Officer (CTIO).
With over 20 years of senior professional experience, Chris joins the provider from a major UK construction and infrastructure services company, Kier Group, where he was responsible for professional technical and technology engineering services.
The latest announcement comes after LightSpeed secured £60m from the Sequoia Economic Infrastructure Income Fund in 2021 (here), which itself followed their original backing of £55m from AtmosClear Investments, Kompass Kapital and Thesaurium.
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Chris Tagg, CTIO at LightSpeed Broadband, said:
“The economic benefits of full fibre broadband are evident, and I am delighted to be joining LightSpeed as its network expands. As the Company grows, we are amassing a brilliant management team that I look forward to working with to provide a first-class customer experience to the towns we serve.”
LightSpeed claims to already be live in parts of 25 towns, such as Boston, Bourne, Braintree, Clacton-on-Sea, Dereham, Downham Market, Fakenham, Holbeach, Hunstanton, King’s Lynn, Long Sutton, Market Deeping, Skegness, Sleaford, Spalding, Stamford, Stowmarket and Thetford. But it’s currently unclear whether they achieved their initial target of 200,000 homes by end of 2022 (the last official figure we had was 30,000 in March 2022).
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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Great guy Chris…good luck
Simple answer Mark – they got absolutely nowhere near 200,000 homes passed. Assuming you mean people able to get service rather than fibre somewhere near them. My home in Holland-on-sea (the only part of their Clacton build supposedly live) you can order but the engineer who came to install couldn’t connect to their actual fibre anywhere. He could connect it to a pole, but couldn’t get any light. They’ve been out 3 times now without success. He said their whole network has problems like that and they have huge difficulty actually getting customers live. My neighbours are still showing as orderable though so i guess we’re still a “home passed”!!!!!
Completely agree with you James B. These guys aren’t making much movement and likely to get crushed by the competition. Lit Fibre smashing them in Clacton as well as Netomnia and Upp everywhere else.
Just look at TBB. Says it all
@james B check out Lit or BeFibre if they cab serve you? Lit more active on TBB and better trustpilot score but check them out
Thanks @Fizz – i’ll take a look
Standing with masks outside and distanced from each other is the best analogy for this shambles of a company. They are barely at 20% of their 200k goal
Really Pablo or whoever you are today
That picture was taken during covid
I’m not sure my comment was deleted for saying covid still exists, they fell for the propaganda and that Fastman has not commented on the homes passed
Therea Fundamental difference between home passed and homes cost connected especially in new areas .the take up compared to homes passed will always not align that’s because you have to spend a lot of money before you get any return
@Fastman – yes, i appreciate that, but if you can’t connect a customer, is it really a “home passed”? If you think it is, then what’s the point of a home passed?
They’ve got cables that have been hanging off certain poles around Skegness, Ingoldmells and Chapel St Leonards for months now. Have seen people on their sponsored social media posts complaining about the same sort of issues among other things.
Beacon park here – and I have it
Many Lightspeed fans in here slating the company I see and forgetting the purpose of the article
If you are anything to do with Lightspeed then listen to the criticism rather than get defensive, because it’s all true, sadly.
Maybe they can figure out how to add an option for static IP or even a dynamic one for an extra couple quid now if he’s got a clue. 1000Mbps is no place for cgnat
This. The CGNATing makes everything more difficult, 1Gb up is great, but without a static and direct NAT I can’t VPN to my home network and make use of it.
It was plagued with connection issues the first 9 months as well. I did renew as when it is working well, the down is fast, but the renewal process had its own nightmares
@Marty Greenwell: Couldn’t you use something like NordVPN with a dedicated IP-address, and configure your device or router accordingly? Not an ideal solution, but it might work.
Of course, LightSpeed should have offered static IP-addresses ages ago, as promised by its former CEO Steve Haines more than a year ago, see https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/11/lightspeed-broadband-list-next-fttp-rollout-towns-in-essex-and-norfolk.html#comment-254331
@GNewton Reverse tunneling is the only way you can do it – but then you have to have that connection open all the time. You’re not going to get that full bandwidth, and maybe run into bandwidth caps. I’ve tried running something via Linode, but it’s an extra expense I don’t want.
I really do not like CGNATing at all, what I want is a secure way of VPNing onto my home network through a fixed IP address where I control the NATing & firewall rules.
Lets hope that the new chief technology officer will get this company back on track.
It has nowhere near reached a coverage of 200 000 premises by the end of last year, as originally intended.
Lightspeed hasn’t had proper rollout plans. As a result its marketing is a mess, it ran advertising campaigns in areas not served by this company with its fibre.
It also looses potential takeup to Openreach, or to other fibre altnets, because in quite a few places it installed fibre a year ago, and then didn’t always follow through with actually connecting homes to its network.
And in some areas there are already multiple fibre providers, thus the takeup rate for these areas will be quite low, probably making it economically unviable.
And it still doesn’t offer static IP-addresses.
Nowhere near reached is a big understatement