XXXX XXXX EVAN WEINBURG REGIONAL FTTH
FULL FIBRE NETWORKS: REGIONAL COVERAGE WITH GUARANTEED SPEED, BUT WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SET ONE UP?
With FTTH rollouts in many countries being financed jointly by governments and major CSPs, there is still room for independents to roll out full fibre networks, particularly in the UK, where the government has been slower than many of its European counterparts to fund broadband infrastructure in hard-to-reach and rural locations, writes Peter Dykes . Optical Connections spoke to Evan Wienburg, CEO of full fibre infrastructure provider Truespeed about how to go about rolling out a high-speed FTTH network to underserved communities.
EVAN WEINBURG
T ruespeed is based in the town of Keynsham near Bristol in South West England and was established around four years ago. As of July 2018, it had over 5,000 premises passed, with around nearly 1,000 customers connected. The company is adding customers at a rate of 1,600 per month, which it plans to increase to 2,500 per month in the near future. By the end of 2018 it is aiming to have around 5,000 customers connected. Across Truespeed’s coverage area, the company plans to pass 200,000 properties by 2025. Initially, Truespeed is offering home, home-office and business packages at between 200Mbps and 250Mbps on an 18-month contract, although it has plans to introduce more services in the future.
where we could accept the money. We knew we could scale from eight people to the 75 or so employees we have today and can grow further in the near future. To scale that much in such a short period of time and still be delivering, is no mean feat.
OC: What services does Truespeed offer?
EW: It’s a distribution network, so we have a couple of residential products but because it’s ethernet, we can sell either leased line type products or other business packages. What people need to know however, is that we’re building an ethernet network on full fibre, it’s multi-gigabit capable and with the technology we’re using at the moment, it’s easily upgraded at the cabinet, so our cabinets effectively give our customers the same sort of service as if they were in a data centre.
OC: Will you offer other services such as email or cloud storage?
OC: How did you go about funding the company?
Truespeed’s ‘up to’ marketing campaign
EW: We are focused on building infrastructure, so we’re not planning to offer things like email or cloud storage, but we can connect our customers to those services very quickly. We have a number of exciting propositions we are working on that no one else has yet done, and we’ll announce those as soon as they are ready. OC: Truespeed guarantees broadband speeds whereas the major networks offer ‘up to’ speeds. Is this a marketing ploy on the part of Truespeed? EW: Not at all. It’s not actually about speed, it’s about volume. It’s an amount of something per second, so if you need more than 100Mbps then that’s the volume of data you need, but the
EW: At first we raised money locally from interested parties who were incredibly keen to see our service up and running in their area. By 2017 we were ready to explore corporate funding and secured £75 million of investment from Aviva Ventures as the first level of investment in July of that year. We went to the City with a very professional business case and evidence-based costs. We weren’t saying ‘we think we can’, we were saying ‘we have done’ and we have these people paying us money to do these things. We presented a very confident financial model and spent a lot of time on due diligence. We also had a lot of support from local utilities with whom we are sharing capabilities. We struck a deal with GPT Networks to buy a duct in a 77-kilometre trunk route, which gave us speed of delivery. In short, we did all the things we needed to do to put us in a position
32
| ISSUE 14 | Q3 2018
www.opticalconnectionsnews.com
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog