In brief: Jersey broadband provider HomeNet has launched a new 2Gbps fibre service called Roadrunner, beginning at the Waterfront before rolling out across its wider network. The company says it is already planning future tiers of 5Gbps and 10Gbps, and describes the launch as setting a new benchmark for residential broadband on the island.
Faster than you can say “buffering”
HomeNet, which owns and operates its own fibre infrastructure across Jersey, has unveiled what it is calling the Roadrunner service, delivering speeds of up to 2Gbps to residential customers. According to Bailiwick Express, the service was first made available to homes at the Waterfront, with a rollout now under way across HomeNet’s entire fibre network, which passes 10,000 homes.
For context, 2Gbps is roughly twenty times faster than the 100Mbps connections that many households currently consider perfectly adequate. Whether you actually need to download an entire film in the time it takes to find the remote is, of course, a separate question, but the direction of travel is clear: demand for bandwidth keeps climbing, and providers are racing to stay ahead of it.
What HomeNet says
HomeNet chief executive Gary Whipp framed the launch in ambitious terms. “Roadrunner isn’t simply faster broadband,” he said. “It’s a statement about where Jersey should be heading.” He pointed to the growing number of connected devices in modern homes, alongside working from home, 4K and 8K streaming, large cloud backups and near-total reliance on the internet for daily life, as the drivers behind the new service.
“We wanted to build a service that doesn’t just meet today’s expectations,” Whipp added, “it exceeds tomorrow’s.”
The company’s chief technology officer, Sabri Mokrani, emphasised that raw speed is only part of the picture. “The challenge isn’t simply making broadband faster,” he said, “it’s delivering those speeds consistently with exceptional reliability and ultra-low latency.” Mokrani described the underlying network architecture as having been built to “enterprise-level performance” standards, and said it is “a platform designed to evolve as technology evolves.”
What comes next
HomeNet has confirmed that its engineers are already planning the next steps beyond Roadrunner, with 5Gbps and 10Gbps residential services in the pipeline, to be built on the same network infrastructure. That is a significant commitment for a small island market, and it signals that HomeNet intends to compete aggressively on technical capability rather than simply on price or coverage.
For Jersey residents, particularly those working from home or running small businesses from residential addresses, the availability of genuinely fast, low-latency broadband is a practical economic matter, not just a luxury. The island’s ambitions as a modern financial and technology hub depend in part on connectivity infrastructure that can match what is available in major cities, and a locally owned provider investing in that infrastructure is a meaningful development.
Source: Bailiwick Express
