Introduction

Back in 2000 ADSL was a game changer, bringing people download speeds of around 10Mbps. Today, it's barely enough to support browsing while listening to music. We did some digging and ended up in touch with Brilliant Brighton - the team supporting Brighton's business improvement district. They helped connect us with some affected residents turned activists, who would become some of Brighton Fibre's first true evangelists. We set out on a project to understand the challenges other operators had faced, and connect the whole street.

The Problem

There are some unique aspects about Gardner street that make it particularly poorly served, connectivity-wise. Gardner Street (nee Gardener street, named after its original agricultural founder Thomas Furner) was one of the earlier Brighton roads constructed in the 1820s. The roads are narrow in pitch and all of the properties are served by large coal cellars, extending in front of the properties right under the carriageway. This means that excavation to lay telecoms duct and build chambers is nearly impossible, and so on the street only 5-6 telecoms chambers exist. Notably there is no ducting to any properties on the street - and it's clear why.

Our Approach

In order to build the capital case for bringing fibre to Gardner Street, we first needed to build some demand and onboard some early customers while we began a project to deliver fibre from two of our exchanges to the street. We reached out to the management team at Komedia to ask if they would be willing to support our plan to bring high speed connectivity to the street and they embraced it with open arms (it had already been something Komedia explored some months before - but hadn't yet got off the ground).

First Deployment

We proposed to bring high speed connectivity to their venue using our radio network, and once that was in place to connect the properties below on the East side of the street using aerial fibre. This would allow us to build a customer base while the fibre build continued.

Outcomes

Today, most of the shops on Gardner street are served by Brighton Fibre. We have taken the average download speed on the street from 8Mbps to 500Mbps - and it's changed the way people do business. Our customer Simon Webster Hair were unable to move to a cloud booking system because it simply did not work on their existing broadband. Filfil felafel could not reliably serve up via the many cloud delivery platforms needed to run a restaurant business without the connectivity we provided. It?s been a pleasure to help solve these problems, and in doing so become honorary members of the Gardner Street community.

What's Next?

We have just begun rolling out our residential fibre product to homes above and behind shops in Gardner Street.