At lunchtime, I was at a briefing by Freedom Fibre for councillors on how the network build is progressing. Summarised below with some extra clarification that I thought was worth sharing:
Now that the cabinet connections are finished, they are in the next build phase for West Felton. West Felton is ahead of many other places in the program and in the 1st wave, along with Whitchurch, Shawbury, Hadnall, Bowmeare Heath & Upper Battlefield. Some will have to wait until the end of 2026 before they enter the program.
This stage will last until January 2025. There will be some delays while Shropshire Council is shut down for Christmas, as some connections will need road closure approval from SC. So it may not go live until the end of their 3-month program window.
Work will involve cabling the poles that have been installed and to individual properties. When all the poles, etc., are connected back to the cabinet, they will be ‘Ready For Service.’ Then, there will be leaflet drops, and they will contact pre-registered residents to advertise the ISP connections available through them.
Residents can register their interest to shortcut that a bit here: https://availability.freedomfibre.com/
Not every Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will be available through them, but they have 14 signed up so far, including TalkTalk and a bunch more are coming. Some leading players like Sky and Plus.Net won’t be on their infrastructure – I imagine they will roll out their infrastructure once the service and market are established. The full list of residential ISP offers is on their website https://www.freedomfibre.com/residential – business packages are available as well here: https://www.freedomfibre.com/business.
If residents have an existing service (Airband, Starlink, SKY), they will need to wait for their contract finishes. Then, residents can inform their current provider that they want to cancel the service and get contact Freedom Fibre to connect. In the future this process will be more streamlined with the ‘One Touch Switch’ initiative, which will simplify the process (similar to switching to a new sim card service for your phone).
