Netomnia UK Start FTTP Broadband Build to Sevenoaks Premises
Some 14,000 homes and businesses in the Kent (England) town of Sevenoaks will soon benefit after Netomnia, supported by UK ISP YouFibre, started a £4.2m project to deploy their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network in the area.
The operator has contracted civil engineering firm GNS Communications to roll out its broadband infrastructure in Sevenoaks, using as much of Openreach’s existing ducting and overhead poles to run their own fibre as possible to minimise disruption. The first phase of work appears to be taking place around the St John’s and Greatness areas.
The operator, which is currently present in parts of almost 40 towns and cities (with many more in-planning), has already covered well over 500,000 premises (RFS) and they have “ambitions of reaching 1 million premises by early 2024” in parts of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (coverage plan – plus additions here, here and here).
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The service, once live, is typically supplied to consumers via YouFibre, which offers unlimited usage, symmetrical speeds, a Wi-Fi router, free installation and 24/7 UK based support. Customers pay from just £21 per month on a 24-month term for their unlimited 150Mbps package (£25 thereafter), which rises to just £29.99 if you want their top 920Mbps plan (£40 thereafter). The latter is also on an offer of £1 a month for the first 3 months.
Zoltan Kovacs, Managing Director at Netomnia, said:
“Our team has started work in Sevenoaks and we’re proud to be able to boost broadband access in the area.
We know how empowering excellent internet access can be and are working hard to level the digital playing field. Not only is the fibre infrastructure we are building reliable, but it is future-proofed, allowing people to take full advantage of all the resources on the internet and the opportunities they offer, unleashing their potential for years to come. And it will deliver speeds that enable the people and businesses of Sevenoaks to keep up with technology advances and growing demand for bandwidth.”
In terms of local gigabit-capable competition, Openreach has already deployed FTTP across most of the town and Gigaclear has done something similar around the Wildernesse area. But otherwise, there is not a lot of full fibre rivals to worry about in the area, which leaves plenty of opportunities.
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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“Some 14,000 homes” – their press releases don’t live up to what they end up delivering.
Reality: a few roads scattered where it was dead easy-peasy to do, but they will mark a larger area on their roll out map to make it look like the whole area and beyond got coverage.
It would be nice if they could complete other areas. They’re all talk and no progress
Well, this is normal? If you waited to move onto the next area after 100%’ing one – your rollout would be painfully slow. Slow and steady in lots of places is a much better idea (and less disrupted to the town/village)
There’s slow and there’s glacial.
Zero progress updates or timescales too. Very off putting
Matt, if the press release says 28,000 (as an example) you’d expect roll out of somewhere near that. Not 3000 achieved for example. I’m in an area where they promised their network. In reality, a complete shambles and no explanation offered. A real patchwork of roads but they all use BT poles anyway so houses are covered. And “no” to buried directly cables as a defence….
This happened in my area – Four streets were done and they moved off and never returned.
In their defence, the centre of town faired better but still. I got in contact with them and they said my area was in some sort of pole hold scenario where they were serveying to see how problems with connecting homes could easily be rectified. Nothing since.
The four streets they concentrated on were missed by Virgin and currently not served by Openreach FTTP, so I assumed they decided a quick buck could be made by doing just those addresses.
@Duncan – If BT aren’t doing the addresses its highly unlikely Netomnia will be. They’re using the PIA product, so BT Poles/Ducts need to be in place & in a fit state to use. If BT skipped them, it’s likely for a reason that needs remediation.
There are a lot of issues with Dpoles and also joint user poles, this is not exclusive to any particular altnet. In either case massive delays or it can even prohibit the rollout from happening
@Matt – By not done I mean not yet I’m assuming but there is every intention to do it. I guess they thought by getting in first they gain the customer first etc.
My Netomnia connection alongside the >25% take up in my local area disagrees.
Contractors aren’t the easiest thing to come by at the moment. The only way to build at scale is many parallel builds, some of which won’t move so quickly.
Have a look at Liverpool’s streetworks if you’re interested in the ‘glacial’ pace of Netomnia’s build.
https://iili.io/HtU8xyJ.md.jpg
Seems to be the story with the altnets generally. Swish are currently building here in Banbury but progress seems rather random to say the least. You have to assume they know what they’re doing but to the average Joe in the street it looks all very amateurish and Openreach now have a 2 year head start.
Have Netomnia actually fully finished a single one of the projects they have started?
Certainly not in Kent they haven’t. They haven’t met a single one of their completion dates! They shout on and on about starting these projects, but they never seem to actually finish any of them. In my area they’re currently 11 months late and still don’t know when they are going to finish. Utter incompetence.
I can get their service now, I’m in Kent. Can’t comment on the rest, but I can indeed get their service.
Hey, not Dover/Temple Ewell/Kearsney areas are you?
Yeah, we are waiting here after having a letter delivered saying we were getting it and nothing. Netomnia checker changed some weeks ago and now says no plans, but You Fibre still says “Great news, we are coming”.
Wishing this company never came now after being really supportive and had spoken to people about them coming here. Perhaps we could have had CityFibre instead and stood a better chance of actual coverage. These areas aren’t even over subscribed with any other fibre operator (including BT). You’d think they would lap up the customers using existing BT pole infrastructure.
Yea why hasn’t Netomnia delivered to my address??? They are so slow they should’ve covered the entire UK by now. How dare they rollout somewhere else other than my house!!! Good thing virgin exists so that I can pay them a lot more money for turtle speeds
Your first three sentences seem to summarise many comments on any Netomnia/YouFibre article for sure.
Can’t please everyone all the time.
Same in Wales, Netomnia coming to Wrexham! Loads of stuff hanging from lamp posts but nothing actually available yet. What’s worse live in a set of flats and no Openreach and no Netomnia installed!
Netomnia will only build in cheap/easy PIA duct/pole areas first.
If you need any digging done, forget it. They will apparently come back and finish off the town later, but remains to be seen where I live. Frustrated as I’ve no full fibre options.
This looks a lot like digging to me.
https://iili.io/HtUUCmJ.md.jpg
These even more so.
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4xXj
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4TqQ
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4ozb
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4ArB
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4u1V
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU45dP
https://freeimage.host/i/HtU4771
Had since May 2023… very rocky start. Bad splice. Took 3 weeks to sort out. Couple of routing issues thrown in too. Tbf they have sorted this all out now. Fingers crossed current stability continues…
All these alt net suck
unless they will become available for you, then they will be the best.
Yup. Symmetrical 8G that hasn’t gone down in months sucks.
Netomnia have said “Live” in my town for 2 months now.
Still can’t order. Every date/estimate they’ve given, they’ve missed and just give another one 2 months down the road. I’m literally begging them to become a customer, but it’s been a year now actually it was a year yesterday since they laid the fibre on my street. They claim live. Can’t order. Please Netomnia/YF, please, hurry up.
Netomnia generally all hype no substance. Not a good examplar for altnets at all. Be very wary of the reality when they say they’re coming to town. National issue for them. Chaos in Liverpool right now.
Over 5000 people on trustpilot disagree with you, with a score higher than any alt now that Community Fibre dropped to 4.8
@Abdullah have you ever actually read those reviews? They are entirely people reviewing the installers… and almost all of them include reference to a delay! Trustpilot is not a reliable source of actual opinions anymore, it is far too easy for providers to game it entirely.
If it is so easy to game it then how come BT, the one company with the most resources, has a whopping score of 1.5 ?
For the reference I tried giving Zen a 1 star review, even though I never been a customer because screw them, and the website got it removed
No chaos here in Allerton, Liverpool. Installation within two weeks, low ping and solid 940 up and down.
What exactly is chaotic, Jim? Big infrastructure projects often seem chaotic as loads going on in parallel.
People trying to discredit trustpilot are the same ones trying to discredit thinkbroadband data because they do not match their own flawed perception
They are the only real publicly available datasets that measure industry performance
Just none of original plans being delivered to vs. website hype of coverage and timelines. Liverpool region is more than Allerton and Sefton Park! Mainly comments from LCRCA project team to be fair, so seem pretty public domain.
Liverpool council has not opened their housing stock to anyone so perhaps that’s why SDU areas such as Sefton have been prioritized
Also the plan is 1 million homes by end of this year, which they have pushed to early next year and still seem to be on target
If you check TBB regularly you can see them progressing. No one can just snap a finger and build all the >200k homes in Liverpool
Well we had a letter from Netomnia February 2022 saying they were coming to our area soon (Wakefield).
Emailed them again today to ask if there was any sign of this happening yet and simply received these two responses:
“Thank you for contacting Netomnia.
I have looked into our works within your area and unfortunately they are still within the design stages.
When our design has been completed and approved we will be able to offer a suggested go live date for your community.
We will also keep you and the community up to date via letter when our works are due to begin.
Please contact us if you have any further questions.”
And
“Thank you for contacting Netomnia.
Unfortunately there is no timeline as yet, we will review these areas on a case-by-case basis when it is viable for us to do so. Due to the scale of our build, we cannot place a timeline on when we will be able to review your area. Unfortunately, I do have to advise that it could be months or years.”
So don’t think it will be happening here any time soon.
Where are you in Wakey? I’ve been connected since last August here.
Located in Crigglestone.
CityFibre looked to make decent progress throughout central Wakefield through Lupset & Horbury, but never seen them coming over this way.
I fact interestingly, it looks like both CityFibre and Netomnia are following the same areas as each other and covering the same patch.
You’d think one would focus on one area and the other elsewhere.
First mover advantage is a big thing.
CityFibre build out from their fibre exchange in a spiral so will be getting to you.
Openreach are focused on the city centre but are cabling into your area.
Are you served by Wakefield or Sandal exchange?
As far as I know/have been told, CityFibre have no plans to cover Crigglestone.
We’re served by Sandal Exchange on OR Infrastructure and don’t think they have any immediate plans here either.
Luckily we’ve got VM and to be fair I’ve never had any problems, it’s just costly but the only option for a decent speed.
CPPP of £300 is pretty impressive. Interesting compared to other recent announcements.
That cost discipline seems to be a source of complaints on here.
They have their budget and stick to it. If you’re especially expensive they might do you at the end if the easier bits came in under budget. If they didn’t you’re out of luck.
It’s brutal but vital to the business model.
and this is where I blame the government/quangos. If they (ALTNETS) are going to do an area and have fancy press releases about 28K covered then I’d expect damn near to that figure not a couple of thousand.
I don’t normally stick up for BT, but if they did this area in Temple Ewell, they would have done all the roads – as there aren’t direct buried cables, the pits are there in the pavement and just a matter of putting onto the poles. They wouldn’t pick and choose unless a significant issue.
The road next to me has Netomnia – my road could come from the same pavement chamber or another one – there are two that could potentially service my lane. Netomnia use existing BT poles here anyway, and they exist, yet not covered despite a letter saying we would be from Netomnia and their fibre checker saying for months they were doing work and we would get it then changed. In fact, You Fibre’s own checker still says “Great News, we are coming”. Great consistency in the checkers then 🙁
I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about.
They announce a plan to cover 28,000 premises in an area they’re going to be covering a couple of thousand on their way to the 28,000.
Openreach can and do miss out individual streets for a while. You’re assuming there’s viable duct between those chambers and the poles in your street: have you seen the plans for the ductwork? Netomnia have. Have you personally rodded them for viability? Netomnia probably have.
Do you know for a fact there are usable polebends even if there’s viable duct to get towards the poles?
We can all assume it should be fine however unless you’ve access to the Openreach network plans and have rodded the ducts from the poles that’s all we’re doing: assuming.
Plenty of streets in this area that are connected to chambers serving other streets that have needed duct overbuild or fixing of numerous blockages as what was there was congested or broken.
A chamber serving somewhere else means one direction out of the chamber is viable, doesn’t mean anything for another.
Because they aren’t covering you doesn’t mean they’ve upped sticks. Roadworks from them can and do drop off as resources move elsewhere a while and they do cabling works that don’t require permits.
If you think you’ve been missed and shouldn’t have been email Netomnia and ask them to take a look. They’ll have the plans from the desktop survey and likely more information from duct rodding. They had to replan a neighbouring street to mine as the duct just wasn’t there. Was on the plans but never actually laid.