12000 Council Homes in Poole to Get CityFibre FTTP Broadband

A new wayleave agreement has been reach between CityFibre and the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council) in Dorset (England), which will see the operator expand their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to include 12,000 council-owned homes.

CityFibre is already investing £30m to expand their FTTP network across Poole and Christchurch (£65m if you include their existing Bournemouth build), which is being supported by civil engineering firm CCN Communications Ltd. Work on that started earlier this year (here) and the expansion to include council properties is thus an important boost.

The deployment forms part of their wider £4bn programme, which aims to cover 1 million UK premises with their alternative FTTP network by the end of 2021 (over 650,000 have already been reached) and then 8 million premises should be “substantially completed” across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK – by the end of 2025 (here). CityFibre may yet extend this target to 10m premises (here).

The new network is being supported by various ISPs, such as Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), TalkTalk, Zen Internet, Giganet and others, but they aren’t all live or available in every location yet (we don’t yet know which ones will serve Poole).

Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre, said:

“We have made fantastic progress rolling out our network, first in Bournemouth, and now rapidly expanding across Christchurch and Poole. This has been achieved through close collaboration with local stakeholders at the council as well as our build partner in the area.

However, as we scale at pace, it’s important to make sure we help everyone in the area level up at the same time. Gaining wayleaves means we will be able to reach some of the residents who stand to benefit the most from better connectivity.

We are excited about building on our progress and making sure we’re connecting more homes, businesses, schools and hospitals, and supporting 5G mobile network deployments in the area in the weeks and months to come.”

At present CityFibre’s main gigabit-capable competition in Poole and Christchurch is still Virgin Media, while Openreach seems to be more focused upon Bournemouth for their FTTP deployment and has so far left the other two towns to suffer FTTC.