ISP Aquiss Shuns wasteful G.fast Broadband in Favour of FTTP
The ISP Aquiss has announced their customers that – after organizing “months of trials” – they will not be launching ultrafast broadband packages based off Openreach’s hybrid fibre G.fast service, which the provider has described as being a resource wasteful technology. Instead they’ll focus on FTTP.
At present the 160-330Mbps capable G.fast technology has already been deployed to cover 2.42 million UK premises, although Openreach (BT) have put their related plans under review and currently only aim to reach 2.73 million premises by March 2020 (here). It’s still possible that some G.fast may be deployed after March 2020 but the focus has clearly now shifted to full fibre deployments.
Despite this a number of providers are still offering G.fast based services – BT, Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Zen Internet, EE etc., although Aquiss believes that “such mind-sets are somewhat misguided.”
Now Aquiss offers a selection of FTTP packages from as little as £30 per month (currently £15.00 for the first 3 months) with free installation, although it’s worth pointing out that they haven’t yet begun to offer any ultrafast speeds (100Mbps+) alongside these; those are expected soon.
Under Openreach’s original plan the G.fast service would have been deployed to cover 10 million premises by the end of 2020.
