Cityfibre Get £2.5bn to Build FTTH Broadband to 5 Million UK Homes

They’ve done it. Fibre optic network builder Cityfibre has announced that their backers have agreed to establish a £2.5bn fund, which will help the operator extend their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband ISP network to cover 5 million premises in 37 UK cities and towns by 2025.

At present the operator already has a Dark Fibre style network in around 50 cities and towns, which primarily serve public sector sites and businesses. On top of that they’re also investing £500m to build a new open-access FTTH network, which alongside Vodafone is working to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes in up to 12 of their existing cities and towns (this Phase One should be “largely complete” by 2021).

After Phase One they had also previously spoken about the “potential to extend” this network up to 5 million homes (representing 20% of the current UK broadband market) by 2025, although that would require significantly more funding.

Since then Cityfibre has been acquired for £537.8m cash by Bidco and will be going private (here). The Bidco group was backed by Antin Infrastructure Partners and West Street Infrastructure Partners, which is a fund managed by Goldman Sachs.

The big news this morning is that Cityfibre’s new backers have agreed to establish a new £2.5bn investment programme for the operator, which they say will be enough to help them deliver on their 5 million aspiration and we’d agree. This, they suggest, could also deliver £85bn in associated economic benefits, but we take such estimates with a big pinch of salt due to the difficulty of quantifying such things.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“With a head-start in 37 towns and cities, this full fibre investment plan enables us to further accelerate our rollout, catalysing huge economic growth in regional towns and cities across the country and transforming the UK’s digital future.

Our rollout will soon bring to scale an innovative wholesale network, providing internet service providers and mobile network operators with greater choice and unrivalled technical capabilities, benefitting all sectors of the market.

We now need to work together across Government, Ofcom and industry to create a level-playing field that continues to encourage investment from multiple network operators, so that full fibre can be delivered as quickly and effectively as possible.”

Jeremy Wright, UK Secretary of State for Digital (DCMS), said:

“The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review set out our plans to maximise full fibre coverage. I’m delighted that CityFibre’s investment in 37 towns and cities across the UK will ensure the vast majority of homes and businesses in those areas can access this technology through new fibre networks.

Significant investment from new network operators is critical to deliver our ambition for nationwide coverage. Through our Industrial Strategy we’re working with businesses and Ofcom to ensure effective network competition that supports investment on this scale.”

The new funding pot will reflect a combination of debt and equity (we’re expecting an announcement on the new debt facility shortly). Meanwhile Cityfibre said they have already identified 37 UK towns and cities where it has critical fibre spine assets, which are now “primed for expansion” via FTTH (listed below).

Today’s news is significant as it represents the operator’s ascent toward becoming a truly major challenger versus the established likes of Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media. But it won’t be an easy process as Openreach are similarly aspiring to reach 10 million premises with FTTP by around 2025 and they’re doing many of the same cities (e.g. the big clash in Coventry – here and here). Competition is going to become aggressive.

On the other hand Openreach’s top speeds are much more expensive than the Cityfibre based Gigafast Broadband from Vodafone, which suggests that they’ll have to adapt or risk losing market share. At present their 500Mbps and 1000Mbps tiers are aimed more at small businesses and that may eventually have to change. Consumers in this market are very price conscious, but offering FTTP on the cheap can harm the investment case.

Meanwhile Virgin Media is only planning to do 2 million via FTTP and we have doubts about whether they’ll achieve that figure, although their existing EuroDOCSIS based Hybrid Fibre Coax cable network will be able to deliver Gigabit download speeds via the forthcoming DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade (covering around 60% of the UK at completion). But at present their big weakness is still upstream speed and flaky router quality.

The other big challenge in all this will be actually building the new network and finding enough civil engineers (Cityfibre said they’ll need to find another 5,000 engineers), which is already a difficulty in the UK with many operators currently wanting to do more FTTP and thus chasing a limited supply of skilled manpower. Scaling up, as Gigaclear recently found (here and here), is very hard to do.

Meanwhile spare a thought for all those forthcoming complaints about street work quality, which invariably seem to follow all of the major civil engineering linked deployments. Particularly in areas where residents may see their streets being ripped up several times over by different operators.

Current 10 Phase One Areas by Order of Announcement
Milton Keynes (£40m)
Aberdeen (£40m)
Peterborough (£30m)
Edinburgh (£100m)
Coventry (£60m)
Huddersfield (£30m)
Stirling (£10m)
Cambridge (£20m) – c.60,000 premises
Leeds (£120m)
Southend-on-Sea (£35m) – c.100,000 premises

The 27 Future Areas Under £2.5bn Plan
Bath
Batley
Bournemouth (£35m) – already has a legacy FTTH network to c.20k premises from Cityfibre
Bracknell
Bradford
Bristol
Crawley
Derby
Dewsbury
Doncaster
Glasgow
Halifax
Harrogate
Leicester
Maidenhead
Manchester
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Northampton (£40m)
Nottingham
Reading
Rotherham
Sheffield
Slough
Southampton
Swindon
Wakefield
Worthing

UPDATE 2:17pm

We have had a comment from UK ISP Zen Internet, which offers some useful thoughts on the appeal of Cityfibre’s network to providers like them at the wholesale level (Zen are currently Openreach-based).

Richard Tang, Founder & Chairman of Zen, said:

“The CityFibre investment should overall be good for UK households as it should provide increased competition to Openreach. Remembering the rise of the cable TV companies in the 90’s however, I hope they don’t make such a mess of all the footpaths!

One thing to note is that deploying the infrastructure is, in my view, the smaller part of the problem of providing viable competition to Openreach. The bigger part of the problem is layering a service on top of that infrastructure – something that Openreach has already achieved and refined.

CityFibre will have their work cut out to deploy the network and develop all the service layers within their stated timescales. Unless they get both aspects right, the competitive threat to Openreach will be very limited. I wish them best of luck.”

UPDATE 21st March 2019

Added the investment levels for Bournemouth and Northampton.