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[Bowdon]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/09/community-fibres-path-to-10gbps-broadband-for-1-million-premises.html

Jeremy Chelot, CEO of London-based Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) ISP Community Fibre, has told ISPreview.co.uk as part of our new interview that he wants to see a “full fibre” USO and is working toward an aspiration of covering more than 1 million UK premises with 10Gbps capable broadband by 2025.

Over the past few years we’ve witnessed the emergence of a new generation of alternative network (altnet) provider(s), most of which tend to specialise in bringing Gigabit broadband to areas that have previously been left neglected. Many of these have developed their own unique models and in 2013 they were joined by Community Fibre (CF), which is fast becoming a serious player in the growing “full fibre” market.

The operator has already raised around £40m and predominantly tends to focus its energy on doing deals with local authorities in urban areas to serve large social housing estates. At the time of writing most of these have taken place in London, although Jeremy aims to replicate their model in “other major UK cities” and may also target new build homes by harnessing Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts.

Such areas tend to be easier and cheaper to serve with FTTH because large populations of people are concentrated over quite a small area. As a result CF expect to extend their 1Gbps capable FTTH network to cover 60,000 homes in London by the end of 2018 (currently they’re at about 25-30k) and they’ve been contracted to build 150,000, although their goal is to reach 500,000 by 2022 (requires more funding than they’ve raised so far).

Going beyond that Jeremy, an internet entrepreneur and computer scientist with over a decade of experience in the industry, said he then aspires to “have over a million premises (and potentially several million) passed by 2025, providing 10-Gbps to all of them.” Jeremy notes that he grew up in social housing and has thus “seen first-hand the opportunities provided by access to faster, better, and cheaper Internet.”

As usual we wanted to know more about how the ISP has achieved all this, as well as their plans for the future and opinions on the current market. Luckily Jeremy has been kind enough to help with the answers.

NOTE: The provider has today also cut the monthly price of their broadband packages, which are now £47 for 920Mbps (average), £25 for 200Mbps and £17 for 40Mbps. This will run until 30th September 2018.