Gigabit nation – Hyperoptic in National Rollout

Hyperoptic today announces that it is expanding its national footprint to 20 cities and towns, enabling hundreds of thousands more UK citizens to have access to its gigabit broadband (1,000Mbps), the fastest broadband service in the UK.

As well as leading the charge to bring gigabit connectivity to the nation, Hyperoptic is also pioneering a new customer-centric approach to the provision of broadband services. It was the first company to offer a “No Contract” option and has a range of broadband-only services, in addition to competitively priced broadband and landline packages. Its’ award winning services have maintained customer satisfaction approval ratings of over 90% since its launch in 2013.

Hyperoptic already services homes and businesses across 13 UK cities and towns: Greater London, Cardiff, Bristol, Brighton, Reading, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle and Nottingham. The new cities and towns that Hyperoptic will be expanding to are Portsmouth, Watford, Leicester, Southampton, Slough, Edinburgh and Woking. Hyperoptic’s network in these locations is already live and installations are being prioritised via customer demand and registered interest.

Hyperoptic is the UK’s leading Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband company - its symmetrical gigabit services are over 135 times faster than traditional ASDL speeds. As it installs fibre all the way into the building it eliminates issues like peak-time slowdowns, buffering and frustrating timeouts caused by the ‘last mile’ copper component in Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) connections.

The arrival of Hyperoptic in these new cities and towns represents a fundamental shift in how resident consumers and businesses will be able to use the Internet – currently the fastest place (according to thinkbroadband data) is Watford, which has an average download speed of 35.7Mbps, and the slowest is Edinburgh, which has an average download speed of 22.9Mbps.

However, many residents in these areas have to endure significantly slower speeds than these. According to tests conducted by thinkbroadband, in the first quarter of 2016, 25% of broadband users had to endure the following crippling download speeds:

• Portsmouth - 6.4Mbps
• Watford - 7.3Mbps
• Leicester - 7.5Mbps
• Southampton - 6.2Mbps
• Slough - 6.7Mbps
• Edinburgh - 6.7Mbps
• Woking - 7.4Mbps

Steve Holford, Chief Customer Officer, Hyperoptic: “We are experiencing huge demand for our full fibre broadband – Brits are losing patience with flaky FTTC packages, they want a hyperfast and reliable service that supports multiple users streaming and surfing the Internet at the same time. We are committed to lead a step change in British broadband, setting a gold standard example for others to follow.”

Andrew Ferguson, Editor, thinkbroadband, adds: “The difference between the average for existing Hyperoptic customers who can choose between 20, 100 and 1000Mbps packages and cities like Edinburgh is pretty clear and reflects not just a step change, but a rocket assisted boost to a world of possibilities.”

According to Ofcom 44% of UK residential fixed broadband lines offer "up to" 30Mbps or more, but less than 1% of connections are delivered via FTTP, which is why the UK fares so poorly in global FTTP ratings.

Steve Holford adds: “In Europe there are over 35.9 million FTTP subscribers – these users are getting the best out of the Internet and reaping the social and economic benefits. Digital leadership will not be achieved by sweating copper assets, but through innovative companies like ours increasing the availability of FTTP broadband. By expanding our footprint we are giving even more Brits the opportunity to experience the power of hyperfast broadband - we are confident as soon as the try full fibre broadband they won’t ever want to go back!”

Appendix – average broadband speeds in new hyper-cities*