Community builder and UK ISP Hampstead Fibre has at this time revealed the primary particulars of their new rollout plan for a “premium” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband service in components of North London, which appears to be concentrating on rich owners and companies who can afford one thing extra akin to a leased line.
We first noticed the supplier final September 2021 (right here), however on the time they had been nonetheless being established and merely spoke of their ambition to construct a brand new “community initially in London and latterly in different places throughout the UK.” London is the goal of a number of aggressively aggressive full fibre builds by Virgin Media (VMO2), Openreach (BT), G.Community, CommunityFibre and Hyperoptic, which makes it a troublesome place for brand new entrants.
Nonetheless, regardless of the challenges, Hampstead Fibre just lately started their first civil engineering work round components of North London’s N2 and N6 postcode areas, which is being supported by civil engineering agency VGC Group. The continued “pilot” construct at present contains three roads round Hampstead Heath – The Bishops Avenue, Winnington Highway and Compton Avenue (these are about half-way to completion).
A fast look reveals plenty of attention-grabbing issues about their pilot construct. Firstly, there are at present no gigabit-capable broadband networks on this space and, secondly, you’d must be pretty wealthy to have the ability to afford the native properties – a few of which stretch into the tens of thousands and thousands of kilos.
The supplier is clearly aware of the areas they’re concentrating on, which is aptly mirrored by their deliberate service pricing (extra on that later) and on the entrance web page of their short-term web site: “Connecting the world’s most wanted streets to the world’s most well-connected datacentres on the pace of sunshine.”
The corporate’s founder, Dr Annie Yang, hails from a poorly served, if very prosperous, a part of North London herself and that is how the ISP was born (the capital metropolis nonetheless has fairly a couple of patches like this).
Dr Annie Yang, Director of Hampstead Fibre, advised ISPreview.co.uk:
“Frankly I used to be extraordinarily dissatisfied with the web service … I used to be getting 0.5 Mbps add, at which level it’s nearly not possible to actually have a video name. There’s no Virgin right here, so the one different choice would have been to get a leased line (which is quite common round us), however I felt that this might be giving in and so Hampstead Fibre was born.”
Nonetheless, in concentrating on such areas, the supplier knew that it additionally wanted to develop a way more premium product than the GPON primarily based networks of shared capability being deployed by others. Consequently, their social media pages are promising to construct a “DEDICATED FIBRE PER HOME“, which sounds extra like a leased line fashion method and certainly that’s the intention.
“Our actual competitors is leased strains, to seize that market we must be each cheaper than a leased line and supply a better high quality service,” stated Dr Yang.”The whole lot we’ve constructed has been about high quality, with out regard for value. The whole community is devoted fibre to each dwelling, not GPON the place as much as 128 homes are sharing bandwidth on one fibre. This implies we’re deploying huge distribution cables, largely 288 fibre cables.”
All of this will likely be supported by a devoted fibre hyperlink to their major point-of-presence in Telehouse North, in addition to “full redundancy” to cut back the danger of outages. “We’re lighting these long-distance hyperlinks with a number of 10G DWDM waves proper now,” added Dr Yang, earlier than remarking that it could be potential to then transfer as much as multiples of 200G waves. Suffice to say, capability doesn’t appear to be an issue.
At launch, the ISP will likely be providing simply two plans: 1Gbps for £100/month and 10Gbps for £500/month, which comparatively talking isn’t low cost, however then we doubt these of their pilot construct space will likely be too involved. The supplier means that they may probably even construct a 100Gbps bundle for properties, however clearly there’s not a lot level in that whereas most computer systems, web providers and end-user units can’t absolutely harness it.
In equity although, we’ve seen common ISPs that also cost across the £100 mark for 1Gbps (County Broadband, Ecom, Jurassic Fibre, GoFibre and so on.), though most of these are centered on rural areas and thus have more difficult economics to contemplate (observe: some properties in Hampstead Fibre’s patch are over 25 metres aside). However such costly plans have gotten much less frequent, with 1Gbps now usually within the £50-£70 area or much less.
On the finish of the day, we like that Hampstead Fibre is making an attempt a special method from different ISPs by specializing in high quality and efficiency over affordability. We hope they reach that, though a lot will depend on whether or not the extent of take-up is enough to gas future development. Assuming the pilot goes nicely, then we anticipate to see them increasing into the Hampstead Backyard Suburb and different areas.