County Broadband intends to expand network to 500,000 premises by 2027

Rural fibre firm County Broadband says it will grow its workforce to 270 by the end of the year in order to facilitate its ambitions of a 500,000 premise network in the East of England over the next five years.

County Broadband received a sizable investment of £100 million earlier this year and had a £46 million cash injection back in 2018 – both from Aviva. The firm says this will fuel 100 new jobs and its fibre infrastructure expansion plans in the East of England.

The vacancies are for roles including network operations, design, build, IT, customer services, and community engagement which will boost its current workforce of 170, and it is also planning to recruit apprentices in the local areas. The firm says it is going to roll out FTTP infrastructure to over 220 villages across Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire.

“This is another important milestone for County Broadband as we continue to grow our team to build and deliver the future-ready broadband services the East of England so desperately needs,” said Lloyd Felton, Founder and Chief Executive of County Broadband. “As a community provider we are fully committed to supporting local villages and towns, creating job opportunities for the region and investing in the future of local people. We are always on the lookout for enthusiastic individuals to join us at this exciting time.”

There is a lot of construction and investment going on in the UK fibre space at the moment, both from the main players like Openreach and location specific platers like County Broadband. As is often the case with corporate messaging in the modern age, fibre rollouts and tech deployments in general are sometimes described almost as if they are some kind of altruistic community projects, and there is a little bit of that going on here with talk of the firm’s ‘long-term commitment to digitally future-proof the region’.

But to be fair, any marketing department selling anything isn’t going to announce proudly that ‘our plan is to capitalise on a regional market where we see demand for our product and to make profit from doing so’ any time soon.

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