Our Mission

The missions of UpFibre is to bring hyperfast fibre optic cable broadband services to the left-behind blackspots of our cities and so transform their social and economic prospects.

More than easy video-conferencing, large file transfers and quick movie downloads today, fibre is the bedrock essential to joining tomorrow’s economy.

5G, virtual and enhanced reality, the Internet of Things, self-driving vehicles and drones and Artificial Intelligence will all require the unlimited bandwidth capacity of fibre optic cable to send and receive vast quantities of information in real time.

Our Founder – Dan Lewis

Prior to launching UpFibre, Dan worked for the Institute of Directors on infrastructure policy for 7 years where it became clear to him that poor broadband was the number one issue facing the country. He wrote several papers and contributed frequently to the media and spoke at many events and conferences to make the case for full fibre broadband, deployed faster.

He has now reached the point where he wants to just do it.

Working with a team of experienced professionals, UpFibre aims to deploy high quality full fibre networks at a smaller scale, at competitive prices, multiple times.

Advisory Board

Chris Horne

Dr Chris Horne is a Chartered Electrical Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and one of the key founders and managers of F4RN – Fibre for Rural Nottinghamshire, a non-profit Community Benefit Society (a special form of Limited Company), run by a dedicated local team with the support of local landowners and volunteers.

Chris’s day job is as the Commercial Director at myenergi Ltd, company that has developed a number of products around renewable electricity generation, heating and electric vehicle charging.

Having completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge his career has included the design, manufacture and maintenance of electrical and control systems for ships before moving to the power industry with Powergen and E.ON. He has extensive experience in power generation and control systems, including the design, procurement, project management, installation and commissioning of power station control and metering systems. He established and led the E.ON power station metering business in the UK, has led large electrical engineering departments and an international department focussed on bringing innovation to new solutions for low carbon generation, improving energy efficiency.

Tim Cowen

Tim Cowen is an equity partner at Preiskel & Co and is independently recognised as one of the leading competition/regulatory lawyers in the EU. He leads the competition law team at Preiskel & Co where his practice covers a full range of competition law and regulatory matters arising across the Tech, Media and Telecoms sector.

Tim led BT’s competition law and public policy team for many years. He led the team advocating liberalisation of the EU market and the system of law that promotes competition among telecommunication and technology companies. From a deep understanding of the reasons for the law he now spends about half of his time on policy and the reasons either for reform or reinforcement of the system.

He has dealt with almost every type of case in telecoms and competition law – advising on the application of the law and leading transactions and litigation. For example he has acted on all major merger cases affecting the sector – either for parties to transactions or third parties affected by them. More recent cases include Google/Double Click,  AT&T/ T Mobile, Syniverse/ Mach, Facebook/WhatsApp, BT/EE and H3G/O2.

Philip Virgo

Philip is a prolific author and subject expert on all matters telecoms. A former information systems professional, programme manager and corporate planner at STC, ICL and Wellcome Foundation. He was one of the first IT professionals sponsored to business school (London Business School 1971-3) and has since spent 40 years appraising IT developments and advising decision-takers, investors, finance directors and politicians accordingly. He has commonly done so via the Conservative Computer (now Technology) Forum, the Parliamentary Information Technology Committee (1981 – 2006), the National Computing Centre (1982–6), Winsafe Ltd and Eurim (1994 – 2010). He has various advisory roles, focused on helping the youngsters of today to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. He has written and blogged for Computer Weekly since 1973 when his MSc paper on “Why Computer Systems Fail” was published as a 10-part series.

Nigel Orchard

Nigel Orchard is Director of Pilot Systems and Pilot Smart Metering. He started out as an engineer with BT before venturing into the world of utility metering, as a Technical Director at Landis + Gyr and then launching his own protocols for communicating data between meters, consumers and suppliers, decades ahead of the current smart meter programme.  Nigel is passionate about the growing data interaction between all utilities and what the opportunities are for homes and businesses.

Malcolm Corbett

Malcolm Corbett is the Founder and Chief Executive of the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA) – the trade body for the Alternative Networks or Altnets.  On behalf of INCA, Malcolm engages with government, Ofcom, business stakeholders, policy development, research, project management and event organisation. The Altnets are  the smaller and fast-growing companies and organisations that are building the next generation of broadband connectivity across the country. Before INCA, he was founder and CEO of the Community Broadband Network.