Cityfibre Secure First Local Full Fibre Network Contract in West Sussex

Fibre optic network builder Cityfibre has today claimed to have won the first contract under the UK Government’s new £190m Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) challenge fund, which will see them working with West Sussex County Council to provide Gigabit FTTP broadband ISP connectivity to 9 urban areas within the council’s jurisdiction.

Back in March 2018 the Chancellor, Philip Hammond MP, issued his 2018 Spring Statement and confirmed a new £95m allocation from the Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) fund (here and here), which was setup to stimulate commercial investment in “gigabit capable” broadband (rural and urban). Some 13 areas across the United Kingdom secured this round of investment and have since been busy seeking suppliers.

Meanwhile the West Sussex Gigabit Project had already received some investment from an earlier pilot scheme. The goal of this scheme is to provide new end-to-end Gigabit dark fibre networks in nine urban areas through a multi-year lease agreement with a single supplier (details below).

The project proposed to test and demonstrate two approaches to funding a “full fibre” roll out. The first approach is that of the Gigabit Voucher scheme, which has already launched (here), while the second is the familiar Anchor Tenancy model; using long-term public sector demand to underpin commercial investment in full fibre, with public sector sites being the first to benefit.

At the time we said that this anchor tenancy model sounded ideal for Cityfibre (they’ve adopted it plenty of times before), which has now proven correct.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“We’re delighted to have been chosen to deliver the Government’s first ‘Local Full Fibre Networks Programme’ project. The LFFN provides a powerful mechanism for local authorities to attract full fibre infrastructure investment. We look forward to using this project with West Sussex as a model for roll-outs in towns and cities across the country.”

According to today’s announcement, the final contract will adopt a 30-year framework agreement 4 year framework agreement (over a 30 year Indefeasible Rights of Use), with a total lifetime value of £52.7m. As part of this Cityfibre will construct new “future-proof full-fibre networks” to 152 council sites in Bognor Regis, Burgess Hill, Chichester, Crawley, Haywards Heath, Horsham, Littlehampton, Shoreham and Worthing. The initial contract value of this first phase call-off under the framework is £5.7m.

Cityfibre said “this contract marks the first project funded under the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s Local LFFN” programme and construction on the project is anticipated to begin in August 2018, with the first connections expected to be activated early in 2019. Upon completion it’s anticipated that this will extend Cityfibre’s fibre optic network coverage to 51 towns and cities across the UK.

One advantage of this approach is that the core fibre optic network often ends up being extended out to cover local businesses via new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) and Ethernet style connectivity solutions. Further down the road it may also open up an opportunity for Cityfibre and Vodafone to extend their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband service to local residents (here).

At present the vast majority of West Sussex can access a superfast broadband (24Mbps+) network, although ultrafast (100Mbps+) coverage can only reach around a third of premises and that’s almost entirely down to Virgin Media’s cable network. In other words, there’s plenty of scope for improvement on the ultrafast side of things.