County Broadband See Success with Connecting Remote UK Homes

Alternative network provider County Broadband, which aspires to cover 500,000 premises across the East of England with their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network by the end of 2027, has revealed that the specialist team they created to help reach the most remote homes has now completed 200 connections.

The full fibre provider, which is being supported by £146 million of funding from Aviva Investors (here), is currently deploying full fibre across rural parts of Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk in England (i.e. they’re building to over 220 villages and rising). Aviva also backs Truespeed (here) and ITS Technology (here) etc.

As part of their plans, they also created a specialist “Bespoke Connections Team” (BCT), which was tasked with identifying innovative technological and cost-efficient solutions to help connect farms and other remote buildings that are not part of their main build. Such properties often require extra work, especially when they could sit back a long way from the main roads and may suffer from other obstacles along the way (rivers and streams etc.).

According to today’s announcement, the new-ish BCT has just delivered its 200th connection to a remote property, although it should be said that we can’t put this into much context as we don’t know how many premises CB’s overall network has passed. Likewise, they haven’t provided many examples to showcase what kind of challenges the team have needed to overcome.

Gavin Ashkettle, Manager of County Broadband’s BCT, said:

“The rollout of full fibre broadband is accelerating across the East of England but we know, particularly in rural communities, many remote homes and businesses continue to be overlooked.

County Broadband typically connects over 80% of a rural village to our full fibre network as part of our main build. The remaining properties can’t easily be connected, often due to physical challenges such as behind hundreds of metres away. That’s where our Bespoke Connection Team comes in.

Whilst some other providers might ignore them for financial reasons, we believe it’s vital they have access to full fibre broadband just like everyone else. Our dedicated team works closely with each home or business to identify how we can connect them in a way which is cost-effective and minimises unnecessary disruption. We are pleased to reach our 200th milestone and we will continue to accelerate our plans across the region.”

Customers typically pay from £33.99 per month (reduced from £40.99) for an unlimited symmetric speed 100Mbps service with a bundled wireless router on a 24-month term, which rises to £69.99 for 900Mbps (reduced from £79.99). Not the cheapest, but some of that is a reflecting the rural nature of their build.