CEO of Freedom Fibre Elected as Honorary Fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering

The CEO and Co-Founder of alternative UK full fibre broadband operator Freedom Fibre, Neil McArthur, has just become one of 71 leading figures in the engineering and technology fields to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Following its AGM on 17th September 2024, the Royal Academy of Engineering announced the group consisting of 60 Fellows, 6 International Fellows and 5 Honorary Fellows, each of whom has made exceptional contributions to their own sector, pioneering new innovations, leading progress in business or academia, providing high level advice to government, or promoting wider understanding of engineering and technology.

NOTE: FF was originally backed by £111m from Equitix and is working to cover parts of Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Shropshire in England and North Wales. The operator previously aspired to cover 2 million UK premises and also holds the state aid supported £24m Project Gigabit contract to cover 12,000 premises in rural parts of Shropshire (here), as well as the £43m contract to reach 15,000 in Cheshire (here).

Just to recap. Freedom Fibre’s new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP / XGS-PON) broadband network currently covers over 300,000 premises across England and is home to 20,000 customers. The wholesale network is typically available via a number of retail ISPs, such as TalkTalk, Yayzi, Home Telecom, Lila Connect and many more.

Neil himself is an industry veteran that first joined telecoms in the mid 90s when deregulation happened, setting up a business ISP called Opal Telecoms. That business ultimately merged with Carphone Warehouse in 2002 and helped to form the foundations for a much more familiar consumer and business provider – TalkTalk.

Neil then ran the technology side of TalkTalk for 8 years and was a non-exec for quite a few years before returning to run Fibre Nation, a direct trenching FTTP venture based in York that was also linked to TalkTalk. In case anybody has forgotten, the Fibre Nation project was sold to CityFibre for £200m in 2020 (here) and at that point Neil decided to stay in the business of building digital infrastructure by establishing Freedom Fibre.

Neil McArthur, MBE FREng, said:

“I am honoured to have been elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Throughout my career in telecoms and through my work founding the Hamilton Davies Trust, I have been a passionate advocate of creating a sustainable and inclusive society and hope to continue this work through the variety of opportunities the fellowship presents.”

Congrats Neil.

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