Cityfibre Ramps-up FTTH Rollout in UK City of Peterborough

Cityfibre’s £30m project to rollout a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network to homes and businesses across the Cambridgeshire city of Peterborough has been given a boost with the appointment of a second civil engineering contractor, locally based firm Telcabo.

At present Morrison Utility Services is doing most of the heavy lifting in the city and they’ve so far brought the network within reach of Garton End, New England, Paston, Dogsthorpe, Newark, Eastfield, Parnwell and The Ortons, where construction is currently ongoing. Admittedly this work seems to have attracted more complaints than Cityfibre’s other projects (here and here).

Apparently Telcabo is set to start their side of the work around the Ortons area this month and that should help them to put the service within reach of “every home and business in the city” by the end of 2021.

Rebecca Stephens, CityFibre’s City Manager for Peterborough, said:

“What a difference a year makes. Just 12 months ago, we got to work on extending the network citywide. Now, we are appointing our second contractor and preparing to scale up our build programme as services continue to go live across Peterborough.

We look forward to working with Telcabo, Peterborough’s citizens and our local authority partners as we move into new areas of the city and light up more streets with reliable, gigabit capable broadband connectivity. We will also be applying our learnings from the build so far and doing whatever we can to manage disruption and minimise the time we spend in each location.”

Rui Rosa, General Manager for Telcabo, added:

“We’re very excited to be working with CityFibre and the Peterborough community to deliver this transformational project and help future proof the city’s digital capabilities for decades to come.

We bring to the project decades of experience in deploying digital infrastructure and like CityFibre, we are committed to working with all stakeholders to deliver a quality build and maintain effective communication with residents as we progress through the city.”

All of this forms part of Cityfibre’s national £2.5bn plan (details) to deploy a Gigabit capable “full fibre” infrastructure to cover 1 million UK premises (homes and businesses) by the end of 2021 and then 5 million across 37 cities and towns by the end of 2025. Vodafone are supplying the service to homes via their Gigafast Broadband packages.

As usual they face competition from Virgin Media’s 500Mbps+ cable network in the city and Openreach’s (BT) on-going work to deploy G.fast and FTTP services of their own.