New Kent UK Homeowners Criticise Persimmon Over FTTP Broadband Monopoly

Residents living in new build homes on the ‘Mascalls Grange Estate’ in Paddock Wood (Kent, England), which was constructed by Persimmon Homes, have called for help after suffering a “nightmare” of protracted broadband outages. But locals have been unable to escape the developer’s sibling ISP, FibreNest, because they have a “monopoly” over the area.

The situation will be a familiar one to ISPreview’s readers because we’ve touched on it a few times before. Essentially, back in 2018 Persimmon undertook a strategic venture to launch FibreNest, which meant that they could build their own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network alongside the construction of new homes – making it cheaper deploy and very quick to connect residents to a fast broadband service. At the time, very few providers were building FTTP, so this was more of a positive.

NOTE: The Mascalls Grange Estate is home to 375 newly built houses and the only broadband service is available via FibreNest (you can’t even get Openreach’s copper lines).

On the flip side, FibreNest’s dominance of such estates often makes it challenging for rival networks to enter, which tends to result in a localised monopoly. Persimmon Homes did respond to this criticism in 2021 by launching a wholesale product (FibreNest Wholesale) that rival ISPs could harness (here), but this has thus far not been attractive enough to entice any other providers.

As one resident, Lois Gray (24), of the Mascalls Grange Estate, said (KentOnline): “From the start, it became clear FibreNest’s monopoly on the estate was more of a burden than a convenience. We don’t have a choice. If we want internet, it has to be through FibreNest. One of the biggest issues is the frequent outages. On January 7, the entire estate lost internet for more than 35 hours.”

Similarly, another resident, Sophie Kemp (26), complained about a spate of protracted service outages over the past few years. “People are losing out on days’ wages; people are not able to make calls or be in contact with family members of friends and when we make communication with FibreNest we’re not getting any response back or any updates that we’re happy with,” said Sophie. Other residents have echoed these remarks.

FibreNest has since apologised for the service problems and added that a “good quality connection is our highest priority,” albeit while acknowledging the lack of choice and adding that the decision to join their network at wholesale would ultimately be a “commercial” one for other providers.

A FibreNest spokesman said:

“Fundamentally, we were created to ensure there is a high-quality broadband service immediately available when people move into their new home. The value of this service is reflected by our customer satisfaction scores which are significantly higher than other large national providers.”

Both Trooli and Openreach have built their own FTTP broadband networks nearby to the estate, although a spokesperson for Openreach said they were “effectively locked out from that location” by Persimmon and that “retro-fitting infrastructure to the estate would require significant, disruptive civil engineering work and would be cost-prohibitive“. The same is likely to be true for Trooli, which will be running much of their new fibre via Openreach’s ducts and poles.

As for FibreNest’s wholesale proposition, it’s possible that the network operator may not yet have built enough scale to make it attractive enough for other ISPs to join (onboarding a new network isn’t cheap, and this one is in the sub-100k premises passed territory). Equally, FibreNest’s own commercials / pricing may simply have been set at a level that is unattractive for other providers.

Frustrated residents have now switched tactics and managed to get support from local MP Mike Martin (Lib Dem), who is doing what he can to raise their plight with the UK government and trying to encourage Openreach to help improve the situation. “It is outrageous residents are forced to put up with poor broadband connection, and have no choice of supplier,” said Mike. But there’s currently no sign of any solutions.

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