Cityfibre’s UK 1Gbps FTTH Home Broadband Live in Edinburgh
Cityfibre’s £100m project to roll-out a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network across the city of Edinburgh in Scotland, which is being supported by UK ISP partner Vodafone (with TalkTalk to follow later), has finally started to go live and connect their first customers.
The new “full fibre” infrastructure, which extends well beyond the operator’s existing 150km long Dark Fibre network in the city (serves local public sector sites and businesses), is being constructed by civil engineering contractor Amey (expected to result in a a 2100km long city-wide network). After a year or so of work the first homes are now able to connect around some parts of the Restalrig, Balerno and Liberton areas of Edinburgh.
As a result locals should be able to take Vodafone’s related Gigafast Broadband packages, which 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); this rises to £48 per month for their top 900Mbps (Gigabit) tier.
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The news means that Edinburgh can now join Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Cambridge, Coventry, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Southend-on-Sea and Stirling as some of the first (Phase One) cities where Cityfibre’s new FTTH network has gone live for customers.
All of this forms part of the operator’s proposed £4bn investment (details), which aims to deploy a Gigabit capable “full fibre” broadband infrastructure to cover around 1 million UK premises by the end of 2021 (phase one – costing c.£500m), before potentially rising to 8 million premises by the end of 2025 or later (here).
As usual Cityfibre won’t have the city all to themselves. At present Virgin Media’s 516Mbps capable (soon to be 1Gbps) network already covers the vast majority of local premises, while Openreach (BT) are also rapidly expanding the coverage of their own FTTP network in the city (plus they have some G.fast but that is slower and less reliable for ultrafast speeds).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Amey are no longer carrying out work in edinburgh
This is not news. This is a PR company that dabbles in fibre.
I would like to ask why Gfast is singled out here as less reliable and slower that full fibre. Surely that applies to Virgins inferior copper hybrid coax network as well?
that trench should be sanded before laying cables/tubes to prevent damage. many times i have seen stones push into the cable/tube when compacting the reinstatement which results in re-excavating to fix. Also looks very shallow the lowest utility is normally 250mm cover?