F&W Networks Builds Full Fibre to Cover 335,000 UK Premises UPDATE
Hammersmith-based F&W Networks has this afternoon announced that their new gigabit-capable full fibre (FTTP) broadband network has grown to cover 335,000 UK premises (up from 250,000 in late Feb 2023), which puts them on course to reach their goal of 1 million premises by 2025.
At present, F&W Networks is busy deploying their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of several counties in England including West Sussex (Horsham and Southwater), Oxfordshire, Greater London, Buckinghamshire (Gerrards Cross, Chalfont Saint Peter, High Wycombe and Beaconsfield), Hertfordshire (Hemel Hempstead), Hampshire, West Berkshire and Surrey (Godalming) etc.
The network is supported by a number of ISPs, such as Hey! Broadband, Merula and Octaplus (Octaplus Supercharged), and rollouts are now said to be underway in over 38 areas in Southern England (F&W Networks claims to have completed its primary build plans in 12 of its initial locations).
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José Luis San Martín, CEO at F&W Networks, said:
“We’re excited at the huge progress we’ve made over the course of last year. The third of a million homes that we have built to date shows that we are set to achieve our goal of one million homes passed by 2025, and will continue to focus on scaling our partnerships, operations, and efficiencies.”
However, at the time of writing it remains unclear whether all of the stated premises are fully ‘Ready for Service’ (RFS), and we’ve asked F&W to confirm.
UPDATE 19th May 2023
F&W has informed us that “the infrastructure has been laid for all 335,000 premises to connect to the service once finalised. Some of these premises are already Ready for Service.” Some.
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 and Linkedin.
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Looks like FW have snatched Foresite money for Haywards Heath build from Lightning Fibre.
I’m based in Copthorne area with underground ducting and it seems roll out has frozen here. No info on roadworks and no answers from anyone when I ask for an update. I’ve had to re contract with my previous provider for 18 months.
FW appear to have a scatter-gun approach from my observations. They stake a claim to a town by building a small footprint and then disappear staking a claim to somewhere else. Their progress can be glacial.
Wow TBB does not even show 100k
An interesting exercise would be to add up the publicly declared ambitions of all altnets and see what number that equates to and compare the altnet number to what INCA have been touting. Add on OR and VM plans that should come to about three times the total number of properties in the land.
Maybe Mark’s got that on a spreadsheet somewhere?
Maybe its in the comments of the INCA article already
Percentages for alt-nets are one of the figures on https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local already
I can’t see it very clearly. What I’m thinking is that in the past few days ISPR has carried articles on four altnets reporting ambitions to cover “up to” 350k, 500k, 500k and 1m properties – and these mostly outfits nobody has heard much of. I’m not sure INCA has presented that aggregate ambition, although it might be in the breathlessly promised 2030 investment number of £24bn, which doesn’t seem to have an attached coverage figure.
But I suppose it’s all rhetorical questioning. We already know the outcome of the epic car crash of the UK’s FTTP/gigabit programme – duplication, vast expense, insolvencies, write-offs, spending well more than would have been needed for 100% cover yet getting far less. It’s interesting to look at the comparator national projects in the INCA/Point Topic report – they’re mostly mis-planned, mind-numbingly expensive projects driven by catastrophically poor political decision making and offering pathetic returns or outcomes from the money being spent.
And the problem in broadband is that irrespective of what INCA might wish, it simply isn’t possible to get a credible return on capital by spending £750 per tax-paying adult primarily to triplicate the cover of Openreach and VMO2/Nexfibre. Even as private capital, it’s still a catastrophic national waste, taking resources that could do other more useful things, and wasting them, and in addition to the lost opportunity costs, it will harm the public directly (eg poor return to pension funds, higher costs for insurance*), or through bailing out the banks if it turns into a full scale meltdown caused by frenetic and misguided investment**.
* For those who don’t know, when an insurance premium is paid, it doesn’t get shoved into a shoebox under the insurance company CFO’s bed, it gets invested. This is just under one trillion quid for UK based insurance companies.
** And you’ll have to admit that (a) this happens on a cyclical basis because nobody ever learns, and (b) we’re overdue for another banking meltdown. You can see the cracks in UK tech banking and the big Swiss money launderers even now.
All of my last post is dripping in gloom, and identifying problems is of course the easy bit. So I suppose I should also offer ideas as to where we go from here. The model of competitive and private provision of telecoms infrastructure is set, that’s not going to change, so what can be done? The first thing is Ofcom and DCMS/DBT need to urgently learn from Ofgem’s errors in the energy market, where letting investors surf a wave and launch new businesses that didn’t have a viable business plan caused market chaos and cost tax payers and energy bill payers around £5bn in avoidable costs. The situation with altnets is precariously similar and brings to mind Warren Buffet’s famous comment about what happens when the tide goes out.
Policy makers need to realise the hazard, and act. And that action needs to be to insert a “viable business plan” clause into Ofcom’s GCoE, including a requirement for this to be signed off as part of the company’s annual audit and submitted confidentially to Ofcom. This needs to be for a viable business that will cover its cost of capital and has cash flow support until that point, not merely to pass the weak “going concern” test of Companies House, that’s easily passed whilst the investors are willing to put more money in. Since it’s clear many altnets would fail the test, I’m not suggesting that companies that can’t pass the test now get eliminated, but they need to show a credible path to viability that isn’t dependant upon unreasonable assumptions.
This could be done, fairly quickly through secondary legislation (ie 3-4 months), incremental costs exist but are minimal, and hopefully everybody benefits.
And correction to earlier post for my typo, should have read “US tech banking”.
F&W are building out simultaneously with toob here in Farnborough
Really not sure why we have 2 competing FTTP altnets slugging it out over the same territory
Annoyingly neither toob or f&w (hey) will confirm when services can be ordered.
After all the gloomy news recently on AltNets and their struggles its good to see some of them are still making good progress.
Saw some F&W guys splicing in Temple Fortune in London today