Cityfibre’s UK Full Fibre Broadband Rollout Reaches 25000 Premises

The latest independent data has estimated that Cityfibre’s new £2.5bn project to roll-out a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network (Vodafone Gigafast Broadband), which aims to cover 5 million premises across 37 UK cities and towns by the end of 2024 (here), has so far reached 25,000 premises.

The deployment work has now begun in most of the ten cities that were initially announced as part of Phase One (listed below), which is being supported by ISP Vodafone and aims to cover a minimum of 1 million UK homes by the end of 2021. In that sense Cityfibre are still in the early ramping-up phase and they’ll need to hire more engineers (5,000 expected – most via third-party contractors) before we see how much progress they can really make.

Nevertheless over the past few months we have witnessed some initial services going live in a few areas within a handful of the initial cities (particularly Aberdeen, Milton Keynes and Peterborough). The latest modelling from Thinkbroadband‘s database suggests that the service may now be available to order (live) by around 25,445 premises.

The Gigafast Broadband packages from Vodafone currently cost from £28 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps (symmetric speed) service on an 18 month contract, including free installation (you also get a very good wireless router in the bundle). This then rises to just £48 per month for their top 900Mbps (Gigabit) tier, which is significantly cheaper and faster than anything Openreach (BT) could offer via their own FTTP.

We’ll keep a watch on Cityfibre’s pace throughout 2019 and see how it improves by the end of this year.

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)
Leeds (£120m)
Southend-on-Sea (£35m)

The 27 Future Areas
Bath
Batley
Bournemouth (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
Nottingham
Reading
Rotherham
Sheffield
Slough
Southampton
Swindon
Wakefield
Worthing