Are Cityfibre any good?
Honest question, because they'll be rolling right past our door, and a few hundred Mb/sec connectivity would be really useful for certain things.
Small Brit broadband provider CityFibre has splashed £29m on connectivity service Entanet and is seeking to raise £185m in additional funds. The cash pile will be used to expand CityFibre's fibre metro area network from 42 to 50 UK cities by 2020. CityFibre said it expects to make around £3m per year by 2020 from the Entanet …
> If it's *really* important to you, register a company
Unfortunately it's too late now; they dug a trench under the road and only put "branches" to business premises. I.e. shops and offices. (And council premises.)
As it happens I am self employed so in that sense I am a business, but it doesn't really make my home a business premises.
"With Entanet now part of the CityFibre family, our combined offering will accelerate the take-up of services over our growing network footprints, leveraging Entanet's enviable channel partner network and continuing to transform digital connectivity for thousands of UK businesses."
Does this guy speak English?
I've been using CityFibre for just over a year, we have two 1Gbp/s synchronous links although they only supplied the fibre our ISP is Level 3. Not had a problem with them tbh.
Speed test results taken just now...
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6430523505
Download speed is a little lower than usual today, usually around 800-850 :/
It generally works out pretty well - business grade dedicated Internet access is a growing market.
Consumers won't pay the prices that ISPs need to charge to offer FTTP without going bust. Most consumers (3 out of 4) will only buy the cheapest Internet service available even where better, faster options are available.
FTTP won't become common until those two facts change.
Wait and see. FTTP won't become common until access costs fall to a point that's acceptable to a customer who's looking at a low per-Mbps price point.. Often made more challenging if customers will only sign 1 year contracts. Most of that is a simple civil engineering challenge rather than telecomms, or even the wacky world of the Interwebz.
Challenge is losing £12.6m on sales of £15.4m, and what, if any efficiency savings might get made from spending £29m on Entanet. So possibly £3m by 2020. There's the £400m broadband carrot, but delivering that still involves substantial cost and risk, hence the general lack of interested parties.
But borrowing money to buy revenues is nothing new in telecomms. This time, maybe it will be different..