Cityfibre Boost 1Gbps FTTH Broadband Rollout in Coventry UK

Cityfibre has announced that their £60m rollout of a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network in the West Midlands city of Coventry, which is supported by UK ISP partner Vodafone, has moved into several new areas of the city (Bablake, Radford and Henley) and added a new contractor.

The first areas to benefit in the city were Longford, Upper Stoke, Foleshill and Holbrook last year (here), although the first homes only went live during March 2019 on Old Church Road and Gayer Street after enough of the network had been built to put the service live (here).

On top of all this work Cityfibre has now appointed a second civil engineering contractor, Callan Connect, to help boost its deployment progress in the city (they’re already working locally with Morrison Telecom Services).

All of this forms part of their wider £2.5bn investment (details) to deploy Gigabit capable “full fibre” broadband infrastructure to cover around 1 million premises in 10 UK cities by the end of 2021 (phase one – costing c.£500m), before rising to 5 million premises across 37 cities and towns by the end of 2024.

Leigh Hunt, CityFibre’s Manager for Coventry, said:

“Over the last six months there has been tremendous progress on our plans to bring reliable, high capacity, gigabit-capable broadband within reach of nearly every home and business in Coventry by 2022.

We’re very much looking forward to working with the team at Callan Connect, many of whom are Coventrians with a real passion for digitally transforming their neighbourhoods, as we prepare to scale up our build programme across the city.

Rest assured, we are working closely with our local authority partners as we move into new areas of Coventry and will do all that we possibly can to manage disruption and minimise the time we spend in each location.”

One interesting point to note here is that the build in Coventry was originally expected to cover “almost every home” in the city by the end of 2021 (they usually aim to reach about 85%+ of premises) but today’s announcement says “by 2022“, although it’s unclear whether this is a reference to early or late 2022. As a general rule when somebody says “by” we usually take that to mean “end of.”

Much of the city can already access Virgin Media’s 500Mbps+ capable DOCSIS (cable) network and Openreach (BT) are also targeting Coventry for their Gigabit capable FTTP roll-out (here), although Cityfibre’s network is significantly cheaper for consumers.

The Gigafast Broadband packages from Vodafone currently cost from £28 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps (symmetric speed) service on an 18 month contract, including free installation (you also get a good wireless router), which rises to £48 per month for their top 900Mbps (Gigabit) tier.