Cityfibre Begin 1Gbps FTTH Broadband Build for Peterborough

The joint £30m plan by Cityfibre and UK ISP Vodafone to deploy a Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network across the city of Peterborough (Cambridgeshire) has finally entered the build stage this week, with the first civil engineering work getting underway around Dogsthorpe.

The Peterborough project was first confirmed in March 2018 and forms part of a wider £500m deployment (here), which will aim to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes in up to 12 of Cityfibre’s existing cities or towns (this is expected to be “largely complete” by 2021). After that there’s also the potential to extend up to 5 million UK homes by 2025 but that would require significantly more investment.

So far the operators have confirmed that Aberdeen, Peterborough, Edinburgh, Coventry, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes and Stirling are among the first to benefit (accounting for about 500,000 premises and £315m of the planned investment). Work is already underway in some of the other chosen cities too (e.g. Milton Keynes).

The first streets to benefit in Peterborough will be Elmfield Road, Garton End Road, Pyecroft, Airedale Close, Isherwood Close, Bettles Close and Park Terrace. The build is expected to take roughly 2 years to complete and the first customers could be live by the end of 2018. We predict that somewhere around 60,000 premises may benefit but an exact figure hasn’t been set.

As we recall the construction phase was originally supposed to begin in May 2018 (it’s running a little behind) and Vodafone expect to launch their related Gigafast Broadband product to customers by early 2019. Locals can pre-register their interest in the service here: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/ultrafast .