Amey Chosen to Build Cityfibre’s Full Fibre Broadband in Edinburgh
Cityfibre has appointed infrastructure firm Amey to build their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network in the Scottish city of Edinburgh (UK ISP Vodafone will supply to consumers), which is expected to cost a little over £100 million and be largely complete by around the end of 2021.
At present Cityfibre has already built a 150km long Dark Fibre network in the city (Edinburgh CORE), which serves public sector sites and businesses. Amey will now be expected to extend this infrastructure to reach local homes and smaller businesses, which is anticipated to result in a 2100km long city-wide network.
Preparatory construction work began in November last year and a significant recruitment drive is already underway to find the necessary civil engineers (not an easy task as they’re also in demand by other operators), which over the project’s lifetime could create around 300 local jobs.
Andy Milner, CEO of Amey, said:
“We’re delighted that CityFibre has chosen Amey to transform the broadband provision in Edinburgh. As a trusted provider of utility services, we’re looking forward to working with CityFibre on this flagship project in a transparent and collaborative way, to deliver a service that adds value, benefits local residents and in turn helps Edinburgh become a truly intelligently connected city.”
All of this forms part of Cityfibre’s wider £2.5bn investment plan to cover 5 million UK premises in 37 UK cities and towns with “full fibre” broadband by the end of 2024 (here), which in total could result in the installation of over 50,000km of cable and the construction of over 150 buildings to house their network equipment.
At its peak, Cityfibre said they expect to “connect 125,000 homes a month,” which seems rather ambitious given that Openreach’s own FTTP deployment with a significantly larger number of engineers is still in the sub 20,000 premises per week territory (we wouldn’t be surprised if they doubled that by the end of this year).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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“t its peak, Cityfibre said they expect to “connect 125,000 homes a month,” which seems rather ambitious given that Openreach’s own FTTP deployment with a significantly larger number of engineers is still in the sub 20,000 premises per week territory (we wouldn’t be surprised if they doubled that by the end of this year).”
That caught my eye. I Suppose the only thing in their favour is going street by street can lead to big blocks of switch on. I could see them hitting those numbers only if they stored it up for a mass switch on….
As Gigaclear will now attest to, talk is cheap when it comes to FTTP deployment timescales!
Doable if they are building at scale in all 37 towns and cities simultaneously. No idea where they’re going to get the manpower from to do that, though.
@CarlT
Methinks there is an extra zero in there.
Either that or they are going to use vapour fibre! This a special FTTP connection that is talked about a lot, is on the verge of being deployed for years but never actually materialises.
CityFibre may expect to… but Amey has a track record of underdelivering in the energy sector.
Lets see if they do better here.
Well lets look on the bright side: there appears to be real fibre going into the ground here.
Amey may not have the best of reputations in some sectors but they do have a long history in civil and TBH this is mostly a civils issue. I’d be surprised if Amey are doing the fibre jointing themselves. Certainly they do have the experience to project manage big things like this and people who do understand how to lay a duct and reinstate a road surface.
If anyone in Edinburgh reads this, and the story 8 down from this, their eyes will start to bleed, they will be shouting not more ******* overbuild as they just lay the last inch of their cold tar!
Connect or pass?
Lite Access will be involved and they are the best at microtrenching……..Amey picked the right partner
Best buy some shares then, Lite Access have plummeted over the passed year.
Moonlightmile… May I ask where you get the info on LTE? that’s a bit of a revelation.
Interested to see this take off. Whether they damage any other services, complaints from public for disturbance and such. It will be interesting to see the reports within the first few months of deployment.