Shortly after its announcement that it has spread services into Worcestershire and the South Midlands of England, UK altnet FullFibre declared that it is significantly expanding into the East and West Midlands regions to provide ultrafast broadband to even more locations.
The expanding Devon-based national wholesale telecoms network provider has a stated mission to deliver gigabit infrastructure to those communities that it have “been left behind by larger telecoms operators”.
FullFibre believes that rising expectations from consumers, and demands such as increased homeworking and video streaming, mean people are becoming ever more dependent on fast, reliable connectivity.
The firm has four regional offices in Exeter, Ledbury, Telford and Derby, and operates its network as a wholesale-only platform, aiming to supply full-fibre broadband coverage to more than 500,000 UK homes and businesses by 2025 while providing a competitive consumer marketplace for local and national internet service providers (ISPs).
The company said decreasing the digital divide between rural and metropolitan regions was key to creating equal opportunities across all regions in the UK, and that it is dedicated to increasing the speed and quality of broadband coverage across rural towns by installing high-speed telecoms equipment that is usually only connected across dense urban areas.
The company’s latest roll-out will see a total of 26 communities and close to 80,000 premises connected by three-quarters of a million metres of fibre. Both homes and businesses in these areas will now have access to speeds of up to 1Gbps – a move that FullFibre assures will futureproof the connectivity infrastructure for generations to come.
The first towns announced for the roll-out in the Midlands West region are Church Stretton and Much Wenlock; and the 24 locations in Midlands East include Southam, Kibworth, Fleckney, Ashbourne, Lutterworth, Market Bosworth, Thrapston, Stoney Stanton, Sapcote, Southwell, Barrow upon Soar, Moira, Markfield, Woodford Halse, Byfield, Barton-under-Needwood, Alrewas, Asfordby, Bottesford, Kingsbury, Kineton, New and Old Arley, and Shenstone.
“Faster broadband connections are being successfully rolled out across the UK but small towns can often get left behind, so we delighted to be announcing the extension of our network into these areas,” said FullFibre CEO Oliver Helm. “Better connectivity in more rural locations will make a real difference to residents and businesses at a time when access to the internet has never been more important.”
As the previous Midlands South deployment was being made, FullFibre’s Fibre Heroes division – a wholesale network provider that allows partnered ISPs to access its network and provide a full-fibre network to residents within their build towns – revealed that it had lit its first cabinet in Droitwich Spa, one of many cabinets expected as part of the town’s roll-out of a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. Fibre Heroes offers marketing and lead generation support to smaller ISPs that do not have the resources to be heard in their local communities.
