RunFibre Put FTTP Live in Charfield West as Gloucestershire Villages De-scoped
Broadband ISP RunFibre, which is rolling out a gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural areas of South Gloucestershire (England), has announced that they’ve just gone live in the village of Charfield West. But on the flip side, they’ve had to remove several villages from their plan due to competition.
Firstly, the deployment to the village of Charfield West – supported by the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), required RunFibre to build an additional 4.8km long stretch of fibre, which connected back to their existing FTTP network in Inglestone Common. As a result, some 222 properties in the area are now ready for service.
However, it’s not all good news. The ISP has also confirmed to ISPreview.co.uk that they sadly had to scale back their coverage plans and de-scope several of their planned villages, including Bradley Stoke, Little Stoke and Patchway – reflecting c. 2,000 premises.
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RunFibre believe in collaborating with other alternative networks (AltNets) to achieve connectivity for the end user, but in this case, they were unable to find a solution with rival Truespeed, which is a larger provider that has also announced plans for much of the same area. As a result, the ISP took the difficult decision to stop their build in the three communities and remove their previously built apparatus.
RunFibre’s Current Coverage (Total Homes Passed)
Project 1 – Hawkesbury Upton, Sopworth & Ingleston Common (510 THP)
Project 2 – Over (111 THP)
Project 3 – Easter Compton (463 THP)
Project 4 – Charfield West (222 THP)
The provider also has a couple of commercial builds rolling out in the region, but at the time of writing they’ve already made 1,486 properties ready for service and have 301 live customers. Customers usually pay from £25 per month on a 24-month term for their 100Mbps (symmetric speed) package, which rises to £60 for their top 1Gbps tier. Plus, they offer a cheaper 100Mbps Social Tariff for £20 per month. The provider also sells different services over the CityFibre network in Wolverhampton and Gloucester.
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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Whilst less good to see equipment being removed, it’s still a positive to see companies trying to avoid over-build that would be at risk of never being commercially viable.
Doesn’t collusion to avoid overbuild breach the Competition Act?
Doesn’t apply to RunFibre as competition law affects the dominant company (probably Openreach). Openreach have agreed pricing with Ofcom so I doubt there are issues.
Its normal to have plans change as the business case changes, the fibre rollout across Openreach and Altnets is going at such a fast pace that it isn’t suprising.
Potentially – you can contact them and ask if you think there’s value in exposing altnets to complex and expensive CMA machinations. As a company can’t be forced to invest in new FTTP assets, nor can they be forced to invest and make a loss, the CMA would have to prove that the companies involved had colluded to stifle competition. As FTTP and gigabit provision isn’t considered a distinct market from FTTC, there’s already a dominant player (OR) and the potential for a Project Gigabit provider coming along, so I suspect that between a couple of new build minnows hoping to avoid bankruptcy by misallocation of capital this comes down to commercial decision making.
There’s also an exemption under section 9, Chapter 1 of the Competition Act in relation to “promoting technical or economic progress, while allowing consumers a fair share of the resulting benefit”. I’d guess that building FTTP would fit that.
Alex A: “as competition law affects the dominant company”
No, it is important to know competition law affects all companies. There’s specific and notably more onerous provisions around companies with a dominant market position, and there are a very small number of exemptions but you can be a real tiddler and still incur the wrath of the CMA. As an example, the CMA investigated a cartel by four p***pot estate agents in Burnham-on-Sea a few years back, fined the companies a total of £370k (I’d imagine their legal bills were more than that) and disqualified a load of their directors.
There’s a hierarchy of organisations you don’t mess with and CMA (and HSE) are up there alongside the mafia.
Openreach have abandoned the part built network in Sudbury Suffolk and removed it from their build program. No explanation has been given
£60 per month for 1 gig overpriced Hilarious country behind technology for more than 20 years.