AB Internet, a UK next-generation Wireless ( Wi-Fi ) Internet Service Provider (wISP), has announced fresh investment of £450,000 to help thousands of homes and businesses in North Wales gain access to faster wireless broadband connections.

The service will make use of the Welsh Assembly Government's (WAG) FibreSpeed project, which originally cost £30m to deploy and runs 200 miles of fibre optic cable between businesses in Caernarfon and Wrexham directly into the UK's broadband network. The UK government recently rubbished plans to extend the FibreSpeed network itself, suggesting that the network "probably isn’t replicable" (here).


The first customers to AB Internet's new service, which will install Wi-Fi equipment on FibreSpeed's masts, should be connected before Christmas and will include many who reside in existing broadband "not-spots"; areas with poor or no broadband connectivity at all.

It's understood that initial / typical internet download speeds will be in the region of 4Mbps (plus an unlimited usage policy), which is below the UK average of 5.2Mbps (Ofcom's May 2010 data) but above the slow speeds that many people had access to before.