UK ISP G.Network Resumes London Full Fibre Broadband Rollout

Broadband ISP G.Network has this morning announced that they are to recommence the building of their 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to homes and businesses in four London boroughs, which follows last year’s build pause (here) and redundancies.

The operator, which originally claimed to be committing around £1bn to support an aspiration for extending their full fibre network to cover 1.3 million premises in London by the end of 2026, ran into problems last year due to a shortage of funding, job cuts and a slowdown in their build (here). But the situation has since improved a bit after more funding was secured and management changes were made.

According to this morning’s announcement, G.Network has now recommenced its build in Camden, Hackney, Islington and Kensington and Chelsea. The new build phase is said to be “underpinned by G.Network’s highly efficient new hybrid build model“, which utilises G.Network’s wholly owned duct network alongside infrastructure owned by other third-parties.

The operator doesn’t spell out precisely how this new approach differs from what they were doing before, but we assume they’ll be adopting a deeper approach to PIA (Physical Infrastructure Access) from Openreach (i.e. making even more use of existing cable ducts and poles, rather than doing lots of their own trenching).

Kevin Murphy, Chief Executive of G.Network, said:

“At G.Network, we are dedicated to delivering fast and reliable broadband to the capital and recommencing the build in these four boroughs shows our commitment to growth. We have a fantastic wholly owned ducted network in the heart of the capital and having trialled the new methods, we are confident we can efficiently broaden our coverage, with minimal disruption to London. We’re excited about this effective route to extending our footprint and strengthening the growth of our business.”

Sadly, the announcement doesn’t set any new coverage targets or even update on their existing build progress, which is disappointing. G.Network instead said that they’re aiming to “serve thousands more business and residential premises” (note: they don’t specify if that’s tens or hundreds of thousands), which could perhaps be interpreted as being a much more limited expansion than their original aspiration demanded.

The last build update we had from G.Network, which was in 2022, stated that they had covered 400,000 premises. But independent checking has – as of January 2024 – so far only been able to identify around 248,000 as being ready for service (here).

Residential customers typically pay from £27 per month for a 300Mbps (100Mbps upload) package on a 24-month contract term (inc. £29 one-off installation fee), which rises to £32 for their top 1Gbps (300Mbps upload) tier. Customers can also take a symmetric speed 900Mbps plan for £42.