Truespeed Add Bleadon to Somerset UK Gigabit Broadband Build

Bath-based alternative network ISP Truespeed appears to have added the rural Somerset (England) village and civil parish of Bleadon, which is home to around 1,100 people, to their rollout plan for a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network.

The community of Bleadon wasn’t mentioned last year, when Truespeed updated their rollout plan for the South West of England (here). But it appears to form part of a combined deployment with nearby Uphill and Banwell on the outskirts of Weston-super-Mare (here), which aims to cover more than 6,000 premises by the summer as part of a £4m investment. The first engineering work has already begun.

All of this forms part of the operator’s ““ambitious” target to reach 500,000 properties by the end of 2026 (mostly across Devon and Somerset), which is currently being funded by a £175 million investment from Aviva. So far Truespeed’s full fibre network has already covered 60,000 premises (up from 50k in Sept 2022) and they have 13,000 customers (up from 11,500) – reflecting a 21.67% take-up.

The provider now aims to “double” this (i.e. around 120,000 premises passed and 26,000 customers) by the end of 2023. Customers of this service typically pay from £40 per month for a symmetric speed 150Mbps package on a 12-month contract term (currently discounted to £25), which rises to £70 for their top 900Mbps tier (now discounted to £49).

However, one risk with Bleadon is that Truespeed won’t have the area to itself for long, with Openreach also planning to deploy gigabit-capable FTTP across the community within the next year or so.