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).