Community Fibre to splash £400m on FTTP connections as it races to cover a million London properties by 2023
- Reference: 1596090553
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/30/community_fibre_400m_london_investment/
- Source link:
The funds come from private equity firm Warburg Pincus and DTCP, an investment management group that specialises in tech infrastructure. Although the terms of the deal are not yet known, Community Fibre said both investors will have a controlling stake in the operation.
Community Fibre has also recruited former EE CEO Olaf Swantee to serve as its executive chairman. In addition to roles at EE and its predecessor Orange, Swantee has also served as CEO of Swiss mobile network Sunrise.
Community Fibre wins £18m from UK.gov infrastructure fund [1]READ MORE
This new investment will allow Community Fibre to surpass its original goal of 500,000 premises by 2020, the company claimed.
The challenger ISP already covers 100,000 premises, mostly in apartment blocks and social housing – dubbed MDUs or multiple dwelling units. At the start of the year, 70 per cent of social housing in Wandsworth and 57 per cent in Southwark was linked to its network.
Community Fibre has expressed desire to connect more individual houses – SDUs or single dwelling units – and the influx of cash should help the firm meet its growth ambitions.
However, Community Fibre will face stiff competition as its network provision increasingly overlaps with that of established rivals, like Openreach and Virgin Media. It also faces challenges from other upstarts, most notably Hyperoptic, which also serves other regions including Liverpool, Bristol, and Manchester. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/23/community_fibre_awarded_18m_to_connect_500000_londoners_with_gigabit_speeds/
[2] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Competition?
Competition is an issue because each fibre provider will stick to it's own area as "demand" won't be there in the area served by one of the other 2 fibre networks. Once you as a customer have that fibre you are largely trapped to that ISP as you will never want to downgrade to a ubiquitous landline based connection.
A lock in even exists with BT. If you are with BT so have an Openreach provided FTTP connection, you would expect to be able to swap to any of the other common ISP's, however when you try (as I did recently) you discover they don't support FTTP. The only exception is Zen which pitches its price only slightly below BT.
Re: Competition?
A lock in even exists with BT. If you are with BT so have an Openreach provided FTTP connection, you would expect to be able to swap to any of the other common ISP's, however when you try (as I did recently) you discover they don't support FTTP. The only exception is Zen which pitches its price only slightly below BT.
It was ever thus. Part of the challenge is the many faces of BT. So you may have Openreach FTTP, but the service would be via BT Retail or Business, who'd buy their connections from Openreach based on FTTP (GEA) per SIN 506. Then BT Wholesale takes that and turns it into FTTP (WBC) per SIN 509-
https://www.bt.com/about/sinet/sins/downloads
Which lists the many sins of BT. So for competing ISPs, they'd need to build their service from those BT products, and depending on whether they're an Openreach or Wholesale customer, have different processes and core/edge costs. If ISPs have already built out xDSL infrastructure for LLU, ie have their kit in BT's exchanges, and have space/power, then they might be able to use GEA. Otherwise it's usually WBC where Wholesale offers a bundled service to your PoP.
Which basically means it's tricky to compete on price or differentiation for basic FTTP. Especially as BT really really didn't want to offer a dark fibre LLU service, so control that by offering Ethernet. And it's not like the good'ol days of LES where you could just take BT's box off and end up with a fibre.
But such is politics and regulatory shenanigans. And also one of the problems with FTTP competition. So if it's a BT service, you might be able to migrate to another ISP that's using BT infrastructure. If the service is from a provider like Community Fibre, you generally can't because they may not have any wholesale service competing ISPs can buy.
That can sometimes be a problem with flats. So an alt-net does a deal with a developer for an MDU solution that can be punted to their tenants as FTTP. MDU's are simpler because you've got a captive market so can fibre up flats cheaply as it's inside plant, so civils costs are less. Then feed those fibres into a switch in a common area & fibre that back to your PoP. If residents are lucky, that might be via PON (Passive Optical Network) and a WDM filter pack muxing individual flats onto wavelengths, but that has distance limitations. So tenants may be stuck with the switch version, which means they're a VLAN on a contended backhaul connection. I've seen a few where tenants were sold 'up to 1Gbps' but the switch connection to the PoP as only 1Gbps.
But that's all part of the joy of designing retail networks. Article should also probably mention City Fibre as an alt-net as they've been active around the UK digging up pavements. And the digging part can also be a problem, especially around cities like London where councils get fed up with roadworks and can put an X year stop on construction. And then of course there's taxes.. So the rateable value of dark or lit fibre that has to be paid regardless of whether you're generating income from that fibre. Unless you're BT or Virgin, who got a sweetheart deal to pay less rates.
Competition?
I live in an area served by Community Fibre (Putney) and the estate has already been "fibre'd up". Every flat has a fibre strand outside ready to get installed. Why Openreach couldn't have done this...
Anyway, if prices stay the same, it's going to be difficult for anyone to compete with them: 150mbs is £25, and 1Gbps is £49