Brsk Extend West Midlands UK Full Fibre Build to South Birmingham
Broadband ISP and network operator Brsk, which has so far built their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 200,000 UK premises (rollout plan), has today announced that their West Midlands (England) focused deployment has been extended into South Birmingham.
The operator, which last year secured a huge funding boost of “up to” £178 million (here) and tends to focus on parts of Greater Manchester, Lancashire, West Yorkshire and the West Midlands in England, holds a long-term aim of passing 1 million homes by 2026. Some of the locations where they’re currently deploying include Cottingley, Keighley and Bingley, Clayton, Allerton & Sandy Lane, Bradford, Queensbury, Thornton, Accrington and many more.
Selly Oak is the first area in South Birmingham to benefit from the latest rollout and the overall expansion will ultimately extend Brsk’s network to cover a total of 385,000 homes across the West Midlands, which is clearly their primary focus. Other areas include Shenley and Edgbaston, with more to follow.
Naturally, they will face some competition from gigabit-capable rivals in these areas, with Openreach and Virgin Media being those with the most significant coverage.
Laura Richardson, West Midlands Regional Head, said:
“The Midlands is growing from strength to strength, as we expand our coverage to further areas within the region, we’re thrilled to be delivering better broadband and first-class customer service to residents and businesses here. We’re proud to be offering choice to what has previously been an area restricted to few providers with very limited full fibre coverage. Working with the community and local councillors, we have big plans for the West Midlands, this expansion into South Birmingham is just the beginning.”
Standard prices typically start from £25 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps symmetric speed package on a 24-month term (inc. a free installation and router), which rises to £45 for their top 900Mbps package (they’re currently selling it at just £30 until the end of this month!).
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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This must be good news for residents. The Birmingham area is a strangely under-served part of the country for FTTH considering the population density. Pretty much only BT and Virgin.
Fair enough for those homes that don’t have a true FTTP option, but much of Selly Oak already does have FTTP, and in that case most residents already have a choice of VM and eleven ISPs on Uswitch who use Openreach, plus all the hundreds of smaller ISPs who don’t contract through price comparison sites.
Overlooking mobile broadband options, and even allowing for lower costs of PIA build, I’d have thought building a third physical network is going to be a lost cause: symmetrical speeds are a differentiator that’ll be a minority interest (not to mention temporary until VM and OR move to XGS-PON), and the mass broadband market is a brutal battle around the £28 a month mark where margins are very slim indeed, and most buyers are happy with “good enough” speeds.
Being in the ground in South Birmingham area of Kings Norton I can confirm this will only help those with overhead lines and will still leave the massive gaps of underground lines stuck with ADSL at sub 2mbps.
Virgin media being available is not a good thing when there is no competition.
Brsk seem to be targeting FTTC lines served overhead in Selly oak, Northfield, Selly park and edgebaston
The pole is now can’t be climbed by openreach. Good work by the alt net again
So since going around homes in the area selling their service and taking my pre-order, they have since sent an email informing of delays and offering to cancel the pre-order. I’ve chased a couple times trying to find out what the hold up is, but get little detail from them.
I was really looking forward to this 🙁