DIGI’s £15 gigabit fibre is now live at 10,000 premises
DIGI is not a name most British households know. It is the retail brand of the Romanian group DIGI Communications, it builds here through a company called WhyFibre, and as reported by ISPreview its full fibre network is now live at more than 10,000 UK premises. That count comes from Thinkbroadband’s latest independent data, not from DIGI, which has said nothing publicly about it. Which is unusual in itself.
The pricing is why it matters. Three packages, each with upload as quick as download: around £15 a month for 1Gbps, £20 for 2.5Gbps and £25 for 10Gbps, sold online on rolling monthly terms. Set that against GlobalData’s review of UK fibre tariffs in June, which found most major brands charging £30 or more for near-gigabit broadband, usually tied to a longer contract. Roughly half the going rate, faster upload, nothing tying you in for a year.
Where it actually reaches
ISPreview describes the live locations as patchy, and lists Houghton Regis, Luton, Letchworth, Hitchin, Stevenage, St Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Watford, Hertford and Hoddesdon.
Patchy is the word to hold on to. Ten thousand premises spread across ten towns is a street here and a street there, not a service any of those towns has. A town name tells you nothing about your own address, and we cannot tell you either. Our availability checker will say which networks reach yours today.
The parts to be careful about
Two things. The first: DIGI has not announced any of this. ISPreview reports no official word from the company and no clarity on where it builds next, so nobody outside it knows whether the next ten thousand premises arrive this year or at all. GlobalData’s reading is that the group’s expansion tends to be stop-start and opportunistic, and that it has run this cheap fibre playbook before, gaining real ground in Spain and much less of it in Belgium.
The second is the promise. DIGI’s own line is “no sudden price hikes, no hidden fees, no fine print”, aimed squarely at a country fed up with mid-contract rises. It is a marketing claim, though, not a contract term anyone has read. A price that low invites the obvious question of how long it lasts. We do not know. Our guide to broadband price rises sets out what a binding fixed price commitment looks like and what to ask. On speed, ISPreview makes the fair point that the 10Gbps tier realistically lands nearer 7 to 8Gbps once network overheads and UK advertising rules are counted.
For almost everyone this changes nothing this week. For the households in that Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire pocket whose street happens to be built, it is a cheap symmetric gigabit line from a company with no UK track record to judge it by. That is the trade. Our guide on whether altnets are safe sets out what small-network risk actually means for a customer, and our cheapest full fibre deals guide tracks the rest of the market.