Truespeed Grows Full Fibre Cover to 91,000 Premises in England
Rural UK broadband ISP Truespeed, which is deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to homes in the South West of England (mostly in Devon, Wiltshire and Somerset), has revealed that they’ve now covered 91,000 premises (up from 75k in May 2023) and have over 17,000 customers (up from 15k).
The operator, which holds an “ambitious” overall target of reaching 500,000 properties by the end of 2026, is currently being funded by a total investment of £175m from Aviva (£134m of which has already been committed to physical builds) and appears to be holding to their current pace of build after a period of acceleration.
The latest progress update was revealed as part of Truespeed’s announcement that it has just connected, for the second year running, the remote rural festival – Valley Fest in the Chew Valley countryside – to 10Gbps connectivity.
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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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Will slow with their redundancy announcement
I’ve not seen one, link?
Not been announced but looks like they have slowed there build down, got rid of contractors and possibly put people at risk.
So far as I can tell, their pace of build hasn’t slowed and is currently maintaining about the same 5,000+ passed per month that I observed back in May 2023. But that’s not to say it won’t slow in the future, although for now I’ve not seen any solid evidence for a slowdown.
19% take up looks quite impressive compared to other altnets. Jurassic have quite a big presence in than area so you’d think they would try to avoid overbuilding them.
Surprised the redundancy hasn’t leaked yet to be honest. Over a third of their staff are being let go and have been issued letters.
Its true Truespeed letting 152 go end of September 105 remaining for now
This is correct details can be provided
You only need to look at True Speed accounts,etc, at Companies House….
The latest company accounts I see were published in Sept 2022, almost a year ago, but they only cover the period to Dec 2021 and so aren’t much help for anything happening right now. I can see nothing there that would confirm redundancies occurring this summer:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09187893/filing-history
Proper sources/links/evidence required before it can be substantiated.
They were due to start building last month in Bathampton,had leaflet through door,no work started & acording to a contractor I spoke to,unlikely it will, wouldn’t confirm whether delaid or cancelled..
But,we also have City Fibre planning to start laying fibre Bathampton soon.
@FTTP
From what I understand Cityfibre aren’t starting any new builds at the moment.
Even some of the builds they’ve started have been stopped.
Wrong. They’ve just started new a new BDUK build.
Building in the village of Hutton at the same time as Virgin Media. One of those 2 may have damaged a BT cable 2 weeks ago.
The usual going to plan in their accounts but they showed an increased loss. Given the higher interest rates and consumers budgets being squeezed the next set of accounts due in September are hardly likely to show an improvement
Increased levels of overbuild will also not help. Probably not much scope to increase the market penetration beyond the 19% neither
[admin note: removed confidential information, but this did help us to confirm, so thanks :)]
They won’t last,it’s only a matter of time.
Just look at Bath,OR,Virgin,CF all laying fibre,then Truespeed follow behind,they have no chance of making an impact,total waste of fibre.
Will intresting to see the account results when released in September.
With these Alt Net time to market in my view is critical. They need to be first into the market and sell it hard. Few Alt nets achieve this. Putting there own ducts in is expensive and slow. BT and other Alt nets using PIA can get to market a lot quicker
Cityfibre are also scaling back their build, obviously in an effort to reduce spending.
I suspect they’ll also be looking to reduce overheads with another round of redundancies.
Incorrect. Their focus is just moving to BDUK areas
@Anon
Call it what you want, focusing on another area, prioritising, etc.
It’s still scaling back.
Wrong again. They are on still on track to deliver and funding 8million. No scaling back at all
@Anon – That’s not what Greg Mesch said when he announced the restructuring/redundancies earlier this year.
@Anon
No scaling back? Still on target to hit 8 million premises by 2025?
So that’s 5.5 million in 16 months or just over 340,000 per month.
Come on, pull the other one!
@jim – I was there. You either weren’t or we’re not listening.
Was the restructure handled well? No
Was the restructure required to remove duplicate roles and bloated teams? Absolutely
And the target is end of 2025 btw. Expect some that to come through acquisition.
@Anon
Talk about moving the goal posts.
So by 2025 had now become by the end of 2025.
And we won’t be building it all ourselves, we’ll be buying some that’s already done.
Come on, get real.
They’ve always said end of 2025. It’s even clarified here back in 2021: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/03/cityfibre-name-279-uk-areas-for-4bn-gigabit-broadband-rollout.html
This is off-topic for a Truespeed story. But it’s worth noting that CityFibre has always expressed the 8 million target as needing to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025, thus they have some flexibility and are a bit ambiguous on how much. Right now, 4-6m seems more realistic, but a lot can change before 2025.
CityFibre has been in this game a long time, so it may be wise not to bet against them just yet.
I’ve seen them build all over Patchway, Bradley Stoke and Thornbury in South Gloucestershire, but they won’t build in neighbouring Filton where there would be a lot of demand for higher speeds due to all the Universities and Colleges in the area. Openreach aren’t even bothering either so I am stuck with Virgin Media if I wanted high speed.