Digital Infrastructure Adds 5 Locations to UK Full Fibre Rollout
Network builder Digital Infrastructure – supported by broadband ISP BeFibre – has today announced that their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) infrastructure has added another five locations to their rollout plan for the United Kingdom and this time they’re all in South Yorkshire (England).
The operator, which began its rollout in 2021 and aims to cover 1 million premises across 80 UK towns and cities by the end of 2027 (here), has so far created an initial rollout plan to reach 400,000 premises. In terms of actual build, in June 2023 they claimed to have already covered 100,000 premises (Ready for Service) and were selling across more than 30 of the country’s towns and cities (e.g. Crewe, Brentwood, Worcester, Clacton on Sea etc.).
At present, Digital Infrastructure still anticipates that their build areas will double by the end of 2023 (c. 60 areas) and as part of that they’ve today ramped-up by announcing the additions of 5 new locations – Thurnscoe, Barnburgh, Bolton upon Dearne, Goldthorpe, and Harlington. It is expected that Thurnscoe and the surrounding areas will be among the first to start going live in Autumn 2023.
Advertisement
The challenge is that DI / BeFibre will not be the only gigabit-capable broadband network in some of these locations. For example, the large village of Thurnscoe in South Yorkshire, which is home to a population of around 9,000, also exists on the FTTP rollout plans for Zzoomm, MS3 and CityFibre. Suffice to say that the competition in some of these areas will be fierce, which is despite some of them being fairly small areas.
Louise Elliott, DI and BeFibre’s Chief Customer and Operations Officer, said:
“There is an ever-increasing demand for high-speed broadband in the UK and we’re here to bring next-generation connectivity to communities — particularly in underserved areas. We’re also challenging the status quo with our commitment to keeping the promises we make when it comes to delivering the speeds, reliability and exceptional service that our customers deserve.”
Customers tend to pay from £29 per month on a 24-month term for an unlimited 150Mbps (symmetric) package with free installation, which rises to just £49 for their top 900Mbps tier. Most of their fastest tiers also give new customers the option of taking either a Weber® Go-Anywhere BBQ (RRP £111.99) or £75 Amazon voucher.
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.
« Vodafone Warn Gov 5G Targets to be Missed if Three UK Merger Blocked
First ISP to give away a BBQ.. £99 on Amazon right now
Weber stuff is pretty solid, too!
Lots of complaints about Be internet, most of them seem to be about them not being able to access UK streaming services, as they allocate Non UK IP Addresses.
What’s a non UK IP address ?
It’s exactly the same as an UK IP address… only difference being it’s mapping to a location by ARIN or RIPE etc. The IP registrars that manage IP address ownership and transfers.
These registers then provide services to providers for IP Geolocation which can get fairly expensive to use.
This in turn means that many high usage services will copy the database to reduce the costs.
Now you’re into the field of replication schedules etc.
In essence… highly unlikely that it’s due to Be not using non-UK IP addresses.
As soon as Be buy them they have fulfilled their responsibility and all they can do is what for everyone else to catch up.
“ only difference being it’s mapping to a location by ARIN or RIPE etc. The IP registrars that manage IP address ownership and transfers.
These registers then provide services to providers for IP Geolocation which can get fairly expensive to use.”
This isn’t quite right…
ARIN, RIPE etc used to assign IPv4 resources to ISPs in their respective region (ARIN is America, RIPE is Europe.) These RIRs do not provide geolocation services. The only location that can be reasonably inferred from the RIR records is the location of the RIR that assigned them. Considering the amount of buying/selling of addresses that is happening this is basically useless now.
There exist other companies who attempt to place a location on an IP address. Maxmind is probably the largest. You can pay to use their database. Larger providers such as Google may attempt to run their own geolocation database.
Sorry I poorly communicated the process.
When I stated providers, I was referring to entities like Maxmind, not Netflix etc.
Not holding out much hope for this lot, was offered service to go live in 3 months in August 2022, they terminated the fibre in the floor box outside my house in Sept 2022 in November was told will be ready in Feb, now being told November 2023, I very much doubt it as I’ve not seen one of the DI rollout vans for over a month now and bidb.uk shows nothing planned 🙁
Lucky Openreach have started the FTTP build in Feb and already the CBT has been installed so won’t be long before that’s live.