Posted: 10th Dec, 2010 By: MarkJ

UK ISP Rutland Telecom (RT) has announced that the small rural village of
Hambleton (Leicestershire), in the middle of
Rutland Water, will soon become the first to benefit from its new deployment of "
super-fast" fibre optic
Fibre-to-the-Premises ( FTTP / FTTH ) broadband internet access technology.
Residents in the area currently suffer from poor download speeds that average just
0.7Mbps. By contrast RT are offering a
50Mbps service to residential properties for
£50 per month (25GB usage allowance) or £100 (250GB) for businesses. Download speeds of up to
1000Mbps (1Gbps) are also available through the infrastructure, albeit not immediately.
Rutland Telecom Statement
Using the same community model we pioneered in Lyddington, we have exceeded the minimum number of premises signed up in advance and raised £250,000 of private investment to allow us to proceed. Over 60% of the village has registered for the service. The UK's most exclusive rural village FTTP network will be installed in the Spring of 2011.
A fibre-optic cable in ducting will need to be dug into each property from the nearest road and customers will need to enter into a wayleave agreement with Rutland Telecom. We did not charge customers a connection fee or any legal costs if they registered before 1st December.
Unlike the GPON architecture of some other lower-cost designs, like BT Openreach FTTH, the topology in Hambleton village will be point-to-point fibre giving each premises access to the full range of wavelengths in future. Each property will have its own dedicated fibre from our fibre cabinet in the village.
RT claims that its efforts will give Hambleton the "
fastest rural village broadband in the UK", although it'll have to beat Fibrestream's similarly capable FTTH service in
Ashby de la Launde (Lincolnshire) first (
here). Customers will also be able to run their phone service over the fibre and save by cancelling any BT line rental.
It should be noted that the minimum cost of installation will be £1000 +VAT, which includes legal costs of a wayleave agreement (a wayleave agreement is a terminable licence for which you pay an annual rent and compensation). That's fairly expensive for most folk, albeit not a million miles from the first-time cost of an inferior Satellite solution.