Cityfibre Hit 100K UK Premises FTTH Broadband Build Milestone

A new batch of independent data has estimated that Cityfibre’s £2.5bn effort to rollout a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network to cover 5 million UK premises across 37 cities and towns by the end of 2025 (here) – supported by Vodafone – has just passed the 100,000 premises milestone.

At present Phase One of Cityfibre’s deployment has already committed around £500m in order to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes and businesses in 12 initial cities and towns by the end of 2021, with the rollout phase for this starting very gradually at the end of 2018 and is still ramping-up today.

The latest modelling from Thinkbroadband’s database, which only looked at cities where a live broadband service on the new network had been spotted (e.g. Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Aberdeen, Coventry and Stirling), found that the full fibre platform had now covered an estimated 100,692 premises.

The operator is building in other cities too (e.g. Leeds) but TBB only includes areas where they can confirm Cityfibre’s network as being live for service.

Cityfibre’s £2.5bn Project – Build Progress

February 2019 – 25,445 Premises
August 2019 – 70,748 Premises
October 2019 – 100,692 premises

At the last update we estimated that between February and August the operator had achieved a build rate of roughly 7,550 premises per month over the past 6 months. The latest update only reflects a shorter 2 month period and so is not as useful, although if this is correct then Cityfibre have clearly accelerated and are now building at a rate of approximately 15,000 premises passed per month (roughly double the prior rate).

We said last time that we wouldn’t be surprised to see them double their build rate by the end of 2019 and that has now come to pass, although they’ll need to go faster still in order to reach 1 million premises by the end of 2021. The good news is that they’re still in the ramping-up phase.

Assuming they’d been able to start at a full build rate in 2019 then over 3 years Cityfibre would have needed to build at around 28,000 premises per month in order to reach 1,000,000 premises in time. The fact that it takes time to ramp-up means they’ll need to reach an even faster deployment rate than 28K in the near future. The operator has previously talked about potentially requiring c.5,000 engineers to work on this.

By comparison Openreach, which has around 30,000 engineers (although only a proportion of those are dedicated to building full fibre), is currently able to build at a rate of 22,000 per week (call it c.100,000 per month) and they aim to cover 4 million premises by March 2021 and then 15 million by around 2025 (currently 1.5 million completed).

Otherwise the related Gigafast Broadband packages from Vodafone cost from £28 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps (symmetric speed) service on an 18 month contract, including free installation (you also get a very good wireless router in the bundle). This then rises to just £48 per month for their top 900Mbps (Gigabit) tier.

UPDATE 29th October 2019:

A small revision to the data, which has added some premises in Bournemouth and a few extra in Coventry, brings the total to 106,665.