Cityfibre and Vodafone Target Aberdeen for 1Gbps Home Broadband

ISP Vodafone and fibre optic builder Cityfibre have today confirmed that the second UK city to benefit from a deployment of their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) ultrafast broadband network will be Aberdeen in Scotland, which is expected to cost around £40m.

Firstly a quick recap. At the end of last year Vodafone and Cityfibre agreed a joint £500m deal to rollout FTTH (here). Phase One of this deployment – due to start during H1 2018 – will seek to reach a “minimum” of 1 million UK homes in up to 12 of Cityfibre’s existing cities and towns, which according to Vodafone is expected to be “largely complete” by 2021.

After Phase One there’s also the “potential to extend” this network up to 5 million homes (approximately 50 towns and cities, representing 20% of the current UK broadband market) by 2025, which will require more investment. Last month the partners announced that Milton Keynes would be the first to benefit from this rollout and Cityfibre committed £40m in order to make it happen (here).

Today Aberdeen has been confirmed as the second city to benefit, which is unsurprising because Cityfibre already have a Dark Fibre network in the city. This is currently being extended to over 100kms (bringing the total public sector sites served to 166) and will no doubt also make a good starting point for the new FTTH network extension.

Douglas Lumsden, Co-Leader of Aberdeen City Council, said:

“This announcement represents a significant step forward in delivering connectivity which will change the lives of residents and give businesses access to new ways of working. Aberdeen City Council is determined to lead from the front in digital transformation and enhance the city’s standing on the global stage.

The collaboration with CityFibre and Vodafone is a wonderful example of our partnership approach in action – where the financial commitment we have made will leverage £40million of private investment in our city’s infrastructure.”

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive of CityFibre, said:

“Our commitment to Aberdeen is further evidence of the action CityFibre is taking to deliver Britain’s full fibre future. Our existing network in Aberdeen provides us with an eighteen-month head-start on a full fibre roll-out to nearly every home and business in the city. With similar FTTP backbone networks already built in over 40 UK towns and cities, our contribution to national full fibre coverage is well underway.

We are getting on with the job of building Gigabit Britain – at full speed.”

The £40m cost of this rollout, which will once again fall entirely on the shoulders of Cityfibre, is the same as in Milton Keynes. Construction of the new FTTH network is due to commence in July 2018 (in Milton Keynes it will begin in March 2018) and locals can pre-register their interest in the service here: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/ultrafast .

Cityfibre and Vodafone hope to complement this effort by harnessing the Government’s new 5-year business rates holiday for new fibre networks (here) and some of the new £400m Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund (here).

We should point out that Aberdeen already has near universal coverage of superfast broadband (24Mbps+) networks via Openreach’s (BT) FTTC platform, although it has hardly any ultrafast connectivity due to the absence of Virgin Media. This makes it a good target for the new FTTH network.