Community Fibre

Hi all,

There is a new ISP signing up buildings in London, eg around Wandsworth. Has anyone here used them?
I cannot find any posts, which is slightly worrying!

They appear similar to many of these new urban based fibre providers. Unlike some they are fibre to the end-point, not just fibre to the building (or vibre to the curb in the USA). They also offer a reasonable router regarding WiFi ability.

http://www.communityfibre.co.uk/

Thoughts welcome and needed!

According to companies house they have been around for 7 years.

But have a look at their filing for 2016.

If I read that right they took in a little over £100K and made a loss for the year of over £1.3M. They also had £2M less cash in hand at the end of 2016 as they did in 2015. You might want to dig a little in to their history on companies house as that to me doesn't suggest a company that is going to be around for much longer.

It's a bit hard to see what is going on financially. They have been losing money slowly up until in 2015 someone bought a few thousand pounds-worth of shares for £4 million more than they were worth. This is showing in the accounts as a "Share Premium".

It looks as though it changed hands officially on 16 December 2015, with that accounting date change, some new directors and a new address.

Some of the expenditure has gone on fixed tangible assets. Which went up from £65,955 in June 2013, to £167,380 June 2014, £845,787 in December 2015 (also a change in accounting year by the look of it), and £1,721,558 at December 2016.

They must have bought something big, causing the "loss".

Their sales in 2015 were £375,997, falling to £105,031 as you say in 2016.

It's prospects? I can't tell but they still have a lot of cash there. But how easily that could be pulled out again if it is haemorrhaging I don't know.

I saw they had £900K in the bank - but if they had a similar loss again then they are going to be in debt. The figures may all be perfectly fine but a business making a loss 10 times more than the turnover looks really odd.

But, there are news articles of them working with London Boroughs to install fibre so all may be fine. Odd though that I couldn't hunt down any users commenting on them. I wonder if MrS has any record of speed test results from customers of theirs?

In reply to a post by ian72:

But, there are news articles of them working with London Boroughs to install fibre so all may be fine. Odd though that I couldn't hunt down any users commenting on them. I wonder if MrS has any record of speed test results from customers of theirs?

As you say they are working with a number of London councils, but this started well before the end of 2016, so not sure why it does not show in results.

I already searched this site before creating this thread, which surprised me too
How indeed do we get this site to share any speedtest insights relating to Community Fibre?

http://tbb.st/1506045338791429355
http://tbb.st/1485450654771512455
http://tbb.st/1492766287316035955
http://tbb.st/1500675504256461855
http://tbb.st/1490273100627289555 - interesting as done on an iPhone

Sample size is too small to make the monthly round up usually

https://www.totaltele.com/497544/Community-Fibre-sec...

Looks like someone believes in their future wellbeing
Their are a couple of favourable reviews on www. ispreviews.co.uk
Ilsa Howling, who joined community fibre in 2016. Was previously responsible for rollout of Freeview Play.

Edited by flippery (Thu 05-Oct-17 21:26:30)

There was an article in the local rag about this;

More homes across Roehampton, Wandsworth and Battersea are set to receive faster broadband

Wandsworth Council is heavily involved in the scheme and has posted slightly more information about it here.

G.Fast pods are also springing up all over the place in Wandsworth.

Thanks. That shows they have real life users then. Hoepfully their finances are a planned burn as part of their network rollout or some sort of restructure and they won't suddenly fold. I certainly have a little jealousy around those speed tests

Edited by ian72 (Fri 06-Oct-17 08:16:55)

Hi! I saw our website had a spike in traffic from here so I thought I'd look around.
Great hear you guys talking about us - we are little known at the moment but actually, have a large FTTP network in central London.

We are a pure FTTP provider and we've been building our own network as an alternative provider for some time but recently came into a large investment which has really supercharged our growth.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/07/london...

We're also active on Trustpilot because we understand that switching to an alternative network isn't always without initial reservations. Feel free to read what our customers have to say:

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/communityfibre.co.uk

Thanks for reading.
Sam