Cityfibre’s FTTH Broadband Rollout Grows to 70,748 UK Premises

The latest independent data has estimated that Cityfibre’s £2.5bn project to rollout a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network to cover 5 million premises across 37 UK cities and towns by the end of 2025 (here) – supported by ISP partner Vodafone – has so now reached 70,748 premises (August 2019).

The £2.5bn project was first announced last October 2018 (here) and its initial Phase One deployment is already investing around £500m in order to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes and businesses in 12 initial cities and towns by the end of 2021. The rollout for this first phase has thus been gradually getting underway since late 2018 and is still in the ramping-up stage (some of the first 12 cities have yet to begin their official builds).

However we now have a good idea of how this early work is going, which is thanks to the latest modelling from Thinkbroadband‘s database. The data suggests that their service should now be available to order (live) via around 70,748 premises (mostly homes) across their initial deployments in Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Aberdeen, Coventry and Stirling.

The figure of 70,748 premises represents nearly a trebling of Cityfibre’s FTTH footprint since February 2019 (25,445 premises), which equates to a build rate of roughly 7,550 premises per month over the past 6 months. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this build rate double or more by the end of 2019 and they’ll need to go faster still in order to reach 1 million premises by the end of 2021.

Assuming they’d been able to start at a full build rate in 2019 then over three years they would have needed to build at around 28,000 premises per month in order to reach 1,000,000 premises in time. The fact that it takes time to ramp-up means they’ll need to reach an even faster deployment rate than 28K in the near future. Cityfibre has previously talked about potentially requiring c.5,000 engineers to work on this.

By comparison Openreach, which has around 30,000 engineers (although only a proportion of those are dedicated to building full fibre), is currently able to build at a rate of 20,000 per week (call it c.90,000 per month) and we’re expecting that to increase a fair bit in order to reach their own ambition of 4 million premises by March 2021 and then 15 million premises by around 2025 (currently 1.5 million completed).

Otherwise the related Gigafast Broadband packages from Vodafone 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) can currently offer via their own FTTP. On the other hand Cityfibre’s network lacks the same depth of familiar ISP choices.