Netomnia UK Start Full Fibre Build for 51,000 Musselburgh Premises
Some 51,000 premises across the East Lothian settlement of Musselburgh in Scotland, including the surrounding area, will soon benefit after Netomnia, supported by UK ISP YouFibre, started a £15.3 million project to deploy a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network across the location.
At present Musselburgh itself is only home to a population of a little over 21,000 (probably c.10,000 premises), thus the 51,000 premises figure suggests that those “surrounding areas” will represent quite a wide expansion that catches a lot of nearby communities. In terms of existing gigabit-capable coverage, the settlement is already well covered by Virgin Media’s network and Openreach has built some of its own FTTP too, plus there are a few altnets in the surrounding areas (e.g. Hyperoptic, OFNL, CityFibre etc.).
Netomnia, which is currently present in parts of around 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 operator tends to focus on conducting a very PIA (i.e. running fibre via existing cable ducts and poles) heavy build, which enables them to keep building costs low and go live more quickly than some of their rivals.
Zoltan Kovacs, Managing Director at Netomnia, said:
“We are fully committed to creating a digital landscape where residents and businesses in Musselburgh and the surrounding communities can access reliable and superfast broadband. We want to empower them by eliminating the digital barriers that have constrained them until this point, providing them with seamless connectivity.
Our vision is a future where reliable internet access is not a luxury but a fundamental right. People across Musselburgh will now be able to access significantly increased speeds, allowing them to fully leverage the vast resources and opportunities offered by the Internet. This will be a game-changer for many.”
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.
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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To be clear, the Royal Burgh of Musselburgh is a large town not a settlement!
Was just going off the Wiki, which says the largest settlement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musselburgh
In before the folks complaining they haven’t been covered yet arrive. 😉
You beat me to it!
Awww 😉
says the guy that gloats at every opportunity about his 10gig link.
meanwhile the rest of us were told we’d have youfibre by now.
Anon – Youfibre went live at my street just last week so be patient and I’m sure you’ll get it too!
If you’d point me to when I last ‘gloated’ about my connection in this comments section, the forum, TBB or even Kitz that’d be grand. Pretty sure I haven’t mentioned it in ages and when I did I was trying to avoid ‘gloating’ so if I failed I need to modify my behaviour.
Thank you!
There are 57K premises in the entire East Lothian Local Authority area, which includes 17 or so more settlements. So 51K in Musselburgh and surrounding makes no sense! Unless by surrounding area they mean all of East Lothian.
The press release figures mean nothing. Usually nowhere near delivered what they claim in my experience. Won’t be true of ALL areas having said that….
They usually work by Openreach exchange rather than town, but obviously more convenient to name the major settlement.
They’ll cover multiple exchanges in towns and cities they mention if they’re there which will include properties on the periphery.
In the case of my area, Wakefield, they’ve built to multiple exchanges in the group – https://telephone-exchange.co.uk/group-list.php?group=Wakefield
They’ve built in Wakefield, Lofthouse Gate and Horbury Ossett so far that I’ve seen. Sandal is presumably on the ‘to do’ list. 2 of the 3 exchanges they’ve built to so far cover premises not in the Wakefield city boundaries.
Hope this helps a little.
Took 12 months from press release for my area to go live/ order.. just saying…
12 months since they started in my town but they ain’t build my street.
It’s worthless
Can certainly be considerably longer than 12 months. They can’t magic up contractors out of thin air and the demand for them is very, very high so some areas will take a while if the resources aren’t there to do them more quickly.
Where they’ve access to the resources they will build faster. They want to get things done as quickly as possible so that they can get paying customers onboard, but they can’t work miracles.
Openreach, Virgin Media and CityFibre were there before and had pre-existing agreements with contractors. Realistically we can’t expect any of the newer altnets to appear in an area with an army of contractors and blitz them at the kind of speed Openreach might.
That said they have access to a lot of resources in Liverpool and are going through that city at quite a clip, just to prove the point this isn’t Netomnia going slowly intentionally. They can only use what’s available to them as far as boots on the ground go and if resources are available they can and are using them to build more quickly.
My own city resources aren’t abundant, CityFibre, Virgin Media and Openreach are all busy nearby with large scale builds and upgrades, while Grain, Spring and BRSK also building in the area, drawing in contractors.
I’ve no doubt Jeremy Chelot and team would be very happy to hear from you if you’ve some ideas on how they could get the people to build more quickly without breaking the bank.
@XGS
Trouble for the altnets is if they can’t get the network built in a timely fashion due to lack of contractor resources then they leave the playing field open to the incumbents like Openreach and by the time they can get contractors in, the build may be uneconomical anyway.
Swish are currently building around our town. They did some work in our street in January and not been back since. Openreach have now been live for 2 years and got 40% takeup, not to mention a large chunk of customers who are probably happy with their FTTC connections.
That’s absolutely a potential issue, Dave.
From the Scottish Road Works Commissioner website, they appear to have civils planned in Musselburgh, Wallyford, Prestonpans, Cockenzie and Tranent
I’m surprised they are going into those towns, Virgin Media (nexfibre) are already building there (I believe mainly via PIA). Interestingly they don’t appear to be targeting other towns that GoFibre are building in/built (North Berwick, Dunbar, Haddington, Prestonpans).
Oops! It seems Prestonpans does appear to be an overbuild with GoFibre as well as Opereach and VM (nexfibre)
There is a very definite line on the planned roadworks, where Netomnia stop and Virgin / Nexfibre begin. Nexfibre are showing plans further east – Longniddry, Macmerry, Aberlady, Gullane, bits of North Berwick and Haddington.
Oops! It seems Prestonpans does appear to be an overbuild with GoFibre as well as Opereach and VM (nexfibre)
To be honest East Lothian is awash with providers big and small so going to be very interesting to see how business cases stack up in the years ahead here. Take up will be shared by so many I cannot see some business case predictions will work in long run.
Openreach and Virgin still building at pace locally too. Be interesting how it pans out in next year.