Rural UK Full Fibre Broadband ISP Truespeed Top 100,000 Premises
Alternative network and broadband provider Truespeed, which is deploying a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across rural premises in South West England, has revealed that they now cover “over” 100,000 premises RFS (up from 95k in Feb 2024) and are home to 21,000 customers (up from 17k in Aug 2023).
Over the last 2 years, the company says they’ve invested significantly into their home city of Bath and expanded their network to villages such as Batheaston, Bathampton and Bathford. On top of that they’ve also reached various rural villages and market towns across Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. But as will be clear above, their build did slow down a bit last year and some jobs were also cut (here).
Since then Truespeed has been putting more of their focus on customer growth, with the operator today noting that it’s now reaching a take-up rate of over 33% within 3 years and 50% within 5-6 years of making a property Ready for Service (RFS).
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James Lowther, Chief Executive, Truespeed, said:
“Since we started in 2014, our mission has been to provide communities not only with world class broadband, but also world class customer service. The South West is one of Britain’s most under-served regions for broadband and we are on a mission to bridge the digital divide and deliver high-quality, reliable broadband to communities across the region.”
We are delighted that over 21,000 customers have chosen to upgrade their broadband to Truespeed and that we have been able to deliver on our promise of a truly better broadband service as demonstrated by our Excellent Trustpilot scores. These industry leading metrics are testament to the effort the team puts in to delivering amazing service for our customers every day”.
Residential customers of the service tend to pay from £25 per month on a 12-month term (£45 thereafter) for a 150Mbps symmetric speed package with free installation and a router, which rises to £39 (£75 thereafter) for their top 900Mbps tier.
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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Congratulations!
That’s around £12m of revenue from 20k customers.
That whole £12m, and then some, will go on debt interest (around £15m).
That’s before you add on wages, COGS and other stuff (£10m+ in 2022).
You could double customers, which isn’t going to happen, and Truespeed still wouldn’t be profitable!
As for what the underlying network is “worth”…
100k premises passed = £50m at £500 CPPP (a similar CPPP to CityFibre although Openreach/others are less at £300-400). Against £115m debt (2022) or more likely nearly £175m today (2024)!
Therefore, Truespeed as a business has no value. The only viable out is a sale which would see lenders take a big hit, or lenders roll their exposure into the acquirer in the hope of a better payday down the line.
The party is over (but congratulations on the 20k customers!).