Community Fibre and Openreach Bring FTTP to Croydon Homes

London-focused UK broadband ISP Community Fibre has signed a new agreement with Croydon Council, which will enable their Gigabit speed capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to reach an additional 11,000 social homes across the borough. Openreach (BT) has also reached a similar access agreement.

Agreements like this tend to focus upon council owned apartment blocks (Multi-Dwelling Units), which can be relatively cheap to connect with full fibre infrastructure, particularly if the management company is co-operative and flexible in their approach. As such the installation will come at no cost to the council.

Exact details of which homes will benefit from the Community Fibre side of this rollout are unclear, although we note that they will also be providing a free WiFi network to the sheltered housing and council-owned community buildings that they cover. Meanwhile Openreach will focus their deployment on social and private residences in Thornton Heath, with plans being discussed to extend coverage.

Work on the new deployment is expected to start within the “coming weeks.” Both Community Fibre and Openreach promise to inform residents when they will be doing the works in their area, and will make sure that all of them are aware once the upgrade is completed.

Alison Butler, Deputy Council Leader, said:

“These agreements will ensure our council tenants and leaseholders have the option to get a high-speed internet service, which will reduce digital exclusion in the borough.

As the world becomes increasingly digital-focussed, this move means our council tenants, and those living privately, will now be able to access the web and many services even more easily.”

Manju Shahul-Hameed, Cabinet Member for Economy, said:

“This agreement will also benefit our businesses as they will be able to access faster internet speeds as we continue to support entrepreneurs across the borough.”

The announcement follows shortly after Openreach announced a new pilot (here), which is intended to help speed-up the delivery of FTTP technology and simplify the way ultrafast broadband is installed in MDUs. Similarly it follows hot on the heels of Community Fibre securing an extra £50m from its two institutional investors – RPMI and Amber Infrastructure (here).

Community Fibre currently aims to bring their “full fibre” network to more than 500,000 premises (homes and businesses) across London by 2022 (they expect to have completed 100,000 by the end of 2019). All of this is being supported by ADTRAN’s Symmetric Passive Optical Network (XGS-PON) technologies.

We should add that the provider’s former CEO, Jeremy Chelot, similarly informed ISPreview.co.uk last year (here) that he aspired to extend their network to cover more than 1 million UK premises with 10Gbps capable broadband by 2025. The funding doesn’t currently exist to do that but they’re now well on their way.