First Connections Live on Southend’s New Gigabit “Full Fibre” FTTP Network

Fibre optic builder Cityfibre has today announced that the first connections on their new £3.24 million Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) based ultrafast broadband and Ethernet network in Southend-on-Sea have gone live. The deployment in Essex is being supported by business ISP Onecom.

The 10-year Dark Fibre project was first announced in March 2016 (here) and the optical network has now grown to 63km (the original plan proposed an extension of up to 100km). The first to benefit are 100 public sector sites (schools, social care buildings etc.) and 40 traffic/CCTV sites are due to be added over the coming months.

The infrastructure will also be made available to help provide capacity for local mobile masts and up to 6,000 businesses.

Trevor Byford, Executive Southend Councillor for Technology, said:

“Digitally connecting people and services together is at the heart of what any 21st Century Council should be doing. Implementing an ultrafast fibre-to-the-premise infrastructure across Southend-on-Sea is an important foundation for delivering our ambitious digital strategy and smart city aspirations.

Becoming a Gigabit City will benefit the whole of Southend-on-Sea including public sector, private businesses and the education sector enabling transformational economic growth and innovation as well as enjoying next generation connectivity.”

Nick Gray, City Development Manager at CityFibre, said:

“Now that the network is live we look forward to welcoming more business users to the network as they position themselves for future growth, while creating an attractive environment for new tech talent, start-ups and investment.

We also look forward to connecting even more Borough Council sites to the network including libraries, leisure centers, museums, hospitals and other community facilities. This will not only support the smooth and efficient running of these services, it will lay the foundations for future developments such as HD CCTV, traffic management systems and public WiFi.

The benefits of full-fibre technology are well documented and are now being enjoyed more widely as the Gigabit City movement spreads across the UK. As an early adopter, Southend is destined to thrive!”

At present there are no plans for the network to be used in the residential market, although Cityfibre has just raised £200 million to start deploying a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband service across up to 1 million homes in 5 to 10 UK towns and cities from 2018. However the operator has yet to confirm which cities will benefit and so there’s still a possibility that Southend-on-Sea might be included.

Cityfibre is understood to have been interested in extending their network by harnessing Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts via the enhanced Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product, although the operator has previously stated that “there’s not enough capacity to build a fibre to the home network in some of [Openreach’s] ducts … and poles” (here).