UK ISP County Broadband, which last year raised £46 million from Aviva to help it rollout a new Gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the rural East of England region, has today confirmed that their build plan will cover 50 rural villages by Q2 2020 (reaching 15,000 total homes passed). The provider has already begun their demand-led network build in several communities around rural Essex (here) and last month they confirmed an expansion to another 30 (here); mostly within the Colchester, Chelmsford, Braintree and near Haverhill (Cambs) areas. In keeping with this they’ve also been busy trying to identify villages in South Norfolk (including Breckland), where they could extend their network (here). NOTE: CB usually aims to secure expressions of interest from 30% of premises in each community they target. The future aim is for 30,000 premises across the East of England. As things stand today CB’s construction has already begun in the chain of build for the first 26 villages and they anticipate the first batch of customers being connected in November 2019. In terms of Norfolk, CB says that they’re currently planning for a possible delivery to about 25 villages. A Spokesperson for CB told ISPreview.co.uk: “These are exciting times for County Broadband as we enter the next stages of what will become a major Hyperfast build roll-out across rural Essex. Our new Hyperfast fibre network will ensure homes and businesses in rural Essex are able to access future-ready FTTH broadband and we are very much looking forward to connecting our first customers in early 2020.” Sadly a full list of the communities they’re targeting has not yet been published, although given the competition in some of these areas (e.g. Openreach and Gigaclear) then we can well understand why they might not yet be ready to reveal such detail. On the other hand it’s difficult to keep these things secret as fibre often follows a logical path and roadworks will eventually show up on a public database. UPDATE 1:35pm Added a comment from CB above.
County Broadband plans to connect 50 villages in the east of England to its Hyperfast fibre network by Q2 2020. The company has already completed a trial project with two local councils and is now working on another three trials involving up to 100 villages. The news comes a year after it secured a £46m ($59m) investment from Aviva to develop its gigabit-capable fibre-to-the-premises network.