Pine Media’s Sheffield FTTP Broadband Build to Hit 50K Premises

UK ISP Pine Media have announced that they plan to include an additional 20,000 premises into their roll-out of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband technology in the South Yorkshire city of Sheffield, which will see their total coverage reach 50,000.

The alternative network provider, which has been operating since 2015, initially started life by building Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) based ultrafast broadband networks (AirFibre) to some of the rural areas surrounding Sheffield (mostly homes and smaller businesses); this covered roughly 15,000 properties.

However, it wasn’t long before they began building gigabit-capable GPON “full fibre networks too, albeit initially only focused upon student halls and large private MDU apartment blocks (Multi-Dwelling Units) across the same city. But since then they’ve expanded out to include residential MDUs, businesses (including the majority of Sheffield’s bars, clubs and some breweries) and individual housing (SDU).

By around the end of last year Pine had already managed to cover 11,000 premises (here) with their FTTP network (8,000 were added in 2019 alone) and at the time they intended to cover another 20,000 properties by the end of 2020 (total of c.31,000). The provider has now announced that they will add another 20,000 premises to their build in the city, which should soon take them to 50,000.

At present their primary focus is still on South Yorkshire, although they do have networks in Derbyshire and as far afield as Kent. Naturally though they won’t have Sheffield all to themselves as Virgin Media, Openreach and Hyperoptic all have rival networks operating and growing in the city. On the other hand, there are still plenty of sizeable gaps where gigabit capable broadband remains absent.