Quickline Extend Full Fibre Broadband to 65K Rural UK Premises

The CEO of alternative rural network operator and UK ISP Quickline, Sean Royce, has today done an interesting video interview with Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet, which among other things reveals that their new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network now covers 65,000 premises passed.

The operator, supported by funding of around £500m from Northleaf Capital Partners, has previously stated that they hold an aspiration to cover 500,000 premises in rural and semi-rural areas across North East England with “ultrafast broadband” via both FTTP and their 5G based fixed wireless technology “by 2025” (here). Some 300,000 of that figure are already being reaching by their wireless network.

The new interview doesn’t reveal much that we didn’t already know, but it does provide some useful insights into how Quickline is building, their approach to public funding and the level of progress being made. In particular Sean Royce reveals that they’ve now covered 65,000 premises with FTTP (it’s unclear if they’re all RFS), which marks a significant improvement on the 10,000 they had at the end of 2022.

Sean notes that they typically “do not build where other people build” (i.e. avoiding overbuild as much as possible), which reflects their focus on rural areas, where commercial deployment models tend to struggle. The operator is similarly supportive of the public investment being provided by the government in such areas, such as via gigabit broadband vouchers, which makes for an interesting contrast with the comments of Netomnia’s boss (here) – something that comes up in the new interview a few times.

Finally, Sean mentions how Quickline expects, “over time“, that two thirds of their network coverage will eventually be via full fibre infrastructure. In addition, it’s noted that their 5G based fixed wireless broadband network can currently deliver “rock solid” speeds of 200Mbps, but in a “few months’ time” they intend to push this up to a “rock solid 400Mbps“.

Residential customers covered by their new FTTP network are usually charged from £29 per month on a 24-month term for 100Mbps (50Mbps upload) speeds with free installation, and that goes up to £49 for their top 900Mbps (450Mbps upload) tier. The first 3 months of service are also free. You can see the new interview below.