Fibre Tycoon Game Lets You Play as an Alternative UK Broadband Network
The owner of comparison site BroadbandSwitch.uk, Dr Alex J. Martin-Smith, has clearly been channelling some of his inner love for the retro video game Transport Tycoon because he’s just launched a new game that anybody can play for free called Fibre Tycoon. Yep, this lets you play as an alternative network trying to roll out a new full fibre network across the UK, albeit interspersed with plenty of comedy.
The game itself, which adopts a very retro astatic, is played through your web browser and adopts a tongue-in-cheek approach to representing the current market. But this is not a spreadsheet style experience and the visual mechanics have been cleverly designed to simplify how you build the network, manage your money and the challenges you’ll face along the way. Suffice to say, it’s easy to get started and quite good fun.
During the course of building your fibre empire you’ll also encounter plenty of spoof news articles and unexpected market developments – all of which seem to have been designed to mirror many of the actual problems that altnets have already had to experience, albeit handled in a significantly less serious way. In this world you won’t find Openreach and Virgin Media, but you will find OpenStretch and Virtue Media O3 etc.
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Clearly a lot of work has gone into this love letter to the original Transport Tycoon, and it’s all the better for it.
Play Fibre Tycoon in Your Browser
https://broadbandswitch.uk/games/fibre-tycoon.html
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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This is a brilliant idea for a game. Now I can overbuild everyone else, invest cash in my own infrastructure and then slash prices to the bone. Just like a real alt-net.
Thanks for wasting my lunch time with this game. I nearly have total domination, but i didn’t have time to eat lunch so i’m now hungry.. oh well.
this is brilliant, i reach out to the guy who made this Alex to say well done and he came striaght back to say version 2 in the making – this is very adictive. Some time and effort has gone in to this, the level of detail is unbelievable. reminds me of good old days of Tycoon games. Worth a play.