Lightning Fibre Sees 31 Percent FTTP Take-up in Old Town, Eastbourne

Broadband network operator and UK ISP Lightning Fibre, which has been building a new “full fibre” (FTTP) network across parts of Sussex and Kent in England, has today revealed that their deployment in the Old Town area of Eastbourne has covered 6,574 (87%) premises and seen 2,021 of those take their service (31% of connectable premises or 27% of the total area).

Just to put this in some context, the Old Town area of Eastbourne first started to go live on their new network in August 2021 and was completed in January 2023 (organic growth of take-up often takes a couple of years to reach a reasonable level). But admittedly this is only a small snapshot of the operator’s efforts and it may or may not be indicative of all their other builds.

The alternative network, which has built to a number of locations like Eastbourne, Brighton and Hove, Worthing, Lancing, Hastings and St Leonards, Heathfield, Hellingly and Broad Oak, Hailsham and Polegate, originally planned to cover 140,000 premises with their gigabit-capable network. But it remains unclear how many premises they’ve reached, and they’ve since had to slow their network build due to various challenges (here and here).

Customers of the service tend to pay from just £22 per month (normally £26) on a 24-month term for symmetric speeds of 150Mbps (inc. free setup and router), which rises to £49 (normally £99) for their top 2.5Gbps speed package. The first month of service is currently free.