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Fibre Tycoon: build Britain's full fibre network
It is 2010. The country runs on copper, the incumbent is still pushing fibre to street cabinets, and nobody has heard of an altnet. You have £45m of the bank's money, two build teams and a map of Britain. Everything after that is up to you.
Plays in any modern browser on a laptop or desktop. Nothing to install, nothing stored about you, and no account needed. Best on a big screen with the sound on.
What you actually do
Click a town. Pay to trench fibre out to it from your nearest connection. Watch the digger crawl along the route, then watch households start signing up once the homes go live. Passing a home earns you nothing at all, which is the single hardest lesson in this industry and the first thing the game teaches you.
From there it becomes a business. You borrow to build, and the interest lands every quarter whether the customers arrive or not. You set your retail price, your marketing spend, your customer service budget and your network maintenance, and every one of those decisions shows up in how many households choose you over the network digging up the same street. You fund community programmes because they are the right thing to do and because your TrustScore is what makes people switch. You take stakes in your rivals, and if you go past half of one the competition regulator wants to know how many towns you both already serve.
It is built on how UK broadband really works
- 235 real towns and cities, each at its true coordinates, from London down to Thurso, Enniskillen and Aberystwyth, with their own household counts, business premises and public sites.
- Real economics. Cost per premises falls with density, wayleaves make cities expensive, trunk routes cost more the further you reach, and take-up is capped by how much of the town somebody has already built.
- Thirty years of real history, from the cabinet rollout and rural public funding, through the separation of the incumbent, the pandemic and home working, the rate shock, the AI build out, and the copper switch-off at the end of January 2027.
- Valuation the way buyers do it, on a multiple of EBITDA or on the asset value per home passed, whichever is higher, with the multiple moving on market sentiment. A crash can halve your company without a single customer leaving.
- 36 rivals, each with its own competence, appetite for risk, pricing and service quality. Some of them are very well run. Some of them will make a mess of it, run out of money, and come to you asking for rescue capital.
Where it came from
Two things. The first is twenty years of working in UK telecoms and the broadband comparison business, and wanting to show people why their street got fibre in 2019 and the next village over is still waiting. The second is Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon, which took up a great many happy months of my childhood and taught me more about business than anything I read at university. The debt to it is obvious and entirely deliberate, right down to the bevelled windows and the performance rating out of a thousand.
How far can you get
There are eleven ranks, and each one needs three things at once: a good performance rating, real scale, and customers who do not resent you. A large network with furious customers stalls. So does a beautifully run village network.
- Cable Puller
- Jointer
- Gang Foreman
- Works Supervisor
- Area Manager
- Regional Director
- Managing Director
- Chief Executive
- Group Chairman
- Knight of the Realm
- Peer of the Realm
Reach the top two and the game starts addressing your chief executive as Sir, Dame, Lord or Baroness. Services to digital infrastructure.
Questions
Is it free?
Completely. There is no signup, no account, no payment and no advertising inside the game. It is a thing we made because we wanted to.
Does it work on a phone?
It runs, and the layout adapts, but it is a game about reading a map of Britain and juggling a dozen windows. A laptop or desktop is much better. A tablet in landscape is workable.
Are the figures real?
The geography is real, the towns are real, the sequence of events is real, and the UK population figures follow Ofcom and ONS estimates. Every financial number is tuned so the game is enjoyable rather than so it forecasts anything, and the game says so in two places. If you want our actual research, that lives in our reports.
Are the rival companies real?
No. Every competitor is invented, with a name chosen to raise a smile from anybody who works in this industry. Any resemblance to a network currently digging up your street is entirely affectionate.
Can I save my game?
Yes. The Game menu will write your whole position to a file you keep, and load it back later. Nothing is stored on our side and nothing is stored in your browser.
Does it collect anything about me?
No. It runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. There is a suggestion box that opens your own email client if you choose to use it.
While you are here
The game is a bit of fun. If you want the real thing, these are the pages that actually save people money.
- Compare live deals at your postcode
- Test your real speed
- How One Touch Switch works
- The copper switch-off in 2027
- The Great Consolidation, Report No. 27, which is the real version of the merger mechanic in the game
- The 82% Country, Report No. 29