CityFibre to Start GBP28m 1Gbps Broadband Build in Stockton

Network developer CityFibre has announced that they’ve committed £28m to help rollout their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across “almost every home and business” within the market town of Stockton-on-Tees, which is in County Durham (England).

Construction work on the new full fibre network in Stockton is currently set to “begin later this year“, although CityFibre won’t have the area all to itself. Rival operator Netomnia has already started to go live – via ISP partner YouFibre – on their own £58m investment to deploy FTTP across the town, while Openreach have also added Stockton to their deployment plans, and then there’s Virgin Media’s existing coverage etc.

Today the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, met with Greg Mesch, Chief Executive of CityFibre, and Matt Vickers MP for Stockton South, to finalise plans for the rollout and to visit a new training facility that will help to skill-up new CityFibre engineers as part of the Government’s Way to Work campaign.

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive at CityFibre, said:

“We are delighted to be adding Stockton to our nationwide full fibre rollout. Investments like this in the digital infrastructure of our towns and cities are critical to unlocking economic growth, new jobs and more efficient public services. Thanks to burgeoning infrastructure competition, CityFibre is making hundreds of similar investments across the country, helping address the digital divide and level up the UK.”

As usual, this deployment will form part of the operator’s wider £4bn investment programme, which has so far enabled their full fibre network to cover 1.5 million UK premises – with 1.3m ‘Ready For Service‘ via a supporting ISP (here). The main aim of this build is to have 8 million premises “substantially completed” – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here).