UKs largest 1 Gigabit per Second Fibre-to-the-Home Service Brings Superfast Broadband to Over 50,000 Properties in 20 UK Regions

Posted by Karen on Jan 13, 2012 12:00:00 AM

We’ve just announced the largest publicly available 1Gb/s Fibre to the home infrastructure in the UK, a joint initiative between Fluidata and Independent Fibre Networks Limited (IFNL), which is part of the Inexus Group of Companies. IFNL’s infrastructure connects into Fluidata’s wholly-owned national network, which means that we can deliver superfast broadband via a choice of more than 40 ISPs to more than 50,000 newly built commercial and residential properties, in 20 sites in the UK. This means that ISPs can access Fluidata’s next generation network for a low one-off cost – mitigating the high costs associated with tunnelling into hard-to-reach areas. As a result, IFNL’s customers have a broad choice of ISPs, which helps keep costs down and encourage the development of new services. This offers businesses and residents in those areas the largest choice of ISPs on any FTTH deployment in the UK today and is the first time that up to 1Gb/s has been made available on such a large scale to residential homes. We know that the UK is lagging in FTTH provision, from recent statistics published by the FTTH Council. According to Chair, Chris Holden, the UK had only 4,500 homes directly fibred in June 2011, but Ireland had 9,700 connected to fibre and Iceland 13,900. Lithuania had 343,400 and Italy 357,000, both exceeding Germany’s 123,300 and Spain’s 101,130. So the Fluidata/IFNL project represents the first major tranche of FTTH connections and should give the market some much needed confidence. It’s a big step forward and shows FTTH is a viable and sensible option for the long-term. It also shows that fibre can be commercially deployed on scale without government hand-outs, which compliments the work we are doing in rural communities. IFNL provides, open access, high speed FTTH connectivity to property developers looking to install future-proof technology for homes and businesses. Among the benefits of fibre is the reduced carbon impact of telecommunications infrastructure for developers and greatly improved bandwidth, compared to copper infrastructures. This is proving very attractive to developers as they look to meet the sustainable codes for new builds while also looking to improve the desirability of their developments for potential residents. As each new development comes online it will be seamlessly integrated into Fluidata’s existing platform, enabling any ISPs connected to the platform to market and sell their services straight away. Speeds start from 50 Mb/s going up to a current maximum of 1Gb/s per property. Without the need to dig fibre into the premises, installation can be dramatically reduced to a few days for customers luckily enough to find themselves in one of the new developments. We spoke to Andrew Robinson from IFNL, who told us: “We have been deploying FTTH technology to new housing developments since 2008, we have 20 sites connected or in build and additional sites being won on a regular basis. As part of the Inexus Group of companies, IFNL is focused on providing the very best services to our connected businesses and homes. We believe that our FTTH solution is ‘state-of-the-art’, the benefits of fibre stop where the fibre stops, which unlike most of our competition is in the home or business. We’re excited to be working with Fluidata as this will help to increase retail competition on our network and ensure our customers have great choice and receive best value as well as superfast speeds.”

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