Truespeed's next phase in Saltford - Winter 2021
Truespeed has announced today that they are going ahead with the next two phases building fibre to the home broadband in Saltford village. This covers the South East side and the North West side of the village leaving only the South West to follow, hopefully not too far behind.
They have told me the budget has been approved, but they will need some who have registered an interest to convert to firm orders before they build. Of course, this is good news, but they remain a "sell and then build" business and not a "build and then sell". This means they get enough people to sign up to justify the cost of building the network before they start.
It's sometimes frustrating for customers to wait, but it makes business sense. They are not a huge global business who can absorb a few mistakes along the way, and Saltford is a very brave project for Truespeed. Previously, they have focussed on rural villages who typically have extremely poor broadband speeds. If you have no choices and painfully slow internet speeds it's an easy sell when Truespeed offer what is, in effect, a dedicated fibre leased line right to your home.
In Saltford we have a limited BT based service up to 76Mb/s down with 18Mb/s up but also most of the village has Virgin cable up to 350Mb/s and 20Mb/s up. So actually we are quite well served. In my other posts, I have explained why Fibre to the Home (FttH or FttP) is vastly technically superior to anything Virgin or BT offers, but not all homes need it. Now I've had it installed for a few months I can confirm for sure, it's very good indeed.
South of the A4, Truespeed plan to build their network covering Uplands Road, Rodney Road, Tyling Road and Manor Road up to the playing fields. They will also build right along Bath Road to the Saltford boundary and on the North side of the village they will include Norman Road and Stratton Road.
Truespeed will also provide free of charge community services to Saltford School, the community Library and Post Office HUB and also Saltford Hall. Over ten years that will save those organisations over £20,000.
Unfortunately Montague Road, the rest of Manor Road, Grange Road, Boyd Road and Claverton Road West (the South West part of the village) will be part of a future project.
What can we do? Well, the more people who order the faster Truespeed will reach their investment point and then, as they have shown in the first phase, they will build it. We just need more to sign up.
If you want to see their brochure and order form you can find it at this link. http://bit.ly/TSSaltford
Their services start at £29.99 pcm for a service faster than any BT based ADSL and go all the way up to a 900Mb/s up 900Mb/s down for £69.99 pcm.
I would love to have Truespeed, but I use it for work. Their router has some serious restrictions (unlike Virgin) and so far a solution has not been found not block critical services.
ReplyDeleteYou can use your own Router, Nigel but that might only be for business customers, I'll check. I have a fixed IP and my own router. The business circuits are more expensive but they might do this for home customers too. Also; for some customers they will unlock the Router and allow you to administer it. The Fritzbox is a good unit. At work we use them for Zen and they perform well. I think the restrictions are to avoid support problems where users don't know what they are doing... there's probably a solution but I'll check and come back to you. :-)
DeleteYes, I've had a lot of too-ing and fro-ing with their support people. But it's currently still a bit academic as I am in the south-east corner of the village, which I don't think is on their priority list. Currently I have Virgin 350 because need need the uplink speed. Their speedtest results (to their own internal servers, let alone the real Internet) rarely gets about 100Mbit/s there days, and the outages are frequent (including the regular 2-30 second freezes).
DeleteTo be more precise, what I need is SIP (I use my own providers, and also use it for testing equipment) plus IP protocols 4 and 41 (IPIP and 6in4). The latter is most critical, as I use the Hurricane Electric tunnelbroker for IPv6 which I need to have - also for equipment testing
DeleteI don't think any of that will be a problem. I run a Mikrotik Router on Truespeed connected directly to their OTU. I have a business 500/500 service which is expensive but I needed the fixed UP. I have full control of my Router with zero Truespeed issues. Previously I use Virgin in modem mode. I had exactly your experience with outages in fact there was a Saltford WhatsApp group formed as they were so common. South East should be next, Nigel. Best if you email me at jon @ jon godfrey . com and I will start a discussion offline.
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