Cityfibre and Vodafone 1Gbps FTTH Broadband is Live in Leeds

The first customers have now gone live on Cityfibre’s new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network in the UK City of Leeds, which will cost £120m to roll-out over the next few years and is being sold by local ISP partner Vodafone via their Gigafast Broadband packages.

The deployment forms part of the operator’s wider £2.5bn plan to reach 1 million premises across the United Kingdom by the end of 2021 (Phase One) and then 5 million by the end of 2025 via 60 UK cities and towns (here). So far we’ve seen live customer connections cropping up in Aberdeen, Bournemouth, Cambridge, Coventry, Huddersfield, Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Stirling.

By comparison the large-scale FTTH build in Leeds, which branches out from Cityfibre’s existing 117km long Dark Fibre network in the area (serves public sector and business sites), officially began in June 2019 (here) and is expected to continue until completion during 2025 (they usually aim to cover more than 85% of premises).

Despite this the operator had said that their new network wouldn’t start to connect customers until early 2020, although they appear to have gone live a little earlier than expected (most of the early build is focused upon Beeston, Hunslet and Riverside, Middleton Park, Holbeck, Pudsey, Bramley and Stanningley).

Kim Johnston, CityFibre’s City Manager for Leeds, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“The first customers in Beeston and Hunslet have been connected to CityFibre’s network and are now receiving superior broadband connectivity from Vodafone. Middleton Park, Holbeck, Pudsey, Bramley and Stanningley are set to be the next areas of Leeds to benefit from the roll-out.”

The build itself is being conducted via a local workforce from civil engineering firm O’Connor Utilities Ltd. We note that much of their early roll-out has been quite slow and steady, although the operator’s forward plans for the next 12 months point to a dramatic ramping-up (particularly during H2 2020 – across the city’s west and southern flanks).

One particularly interesting thing to note here is that Cityfibre’s full fibre build is going to directly rub up against Openreach’s FTTP in a number of places next year, particularly around parts of Morley to the south west of Leeds. Likewise Virgin Media’s FTTP extension in other parts of Leeds is in a potentially similar boat, albeit not to the same scale.

We can easily foresee a situation where some streets are dug up by one operator, only for another to come along soon after to do the same (locals are unlikely to welcome that level of disruption). Given the sheer scale of Leeds, it’s entirely possible that this could be the biggest UK city overlap between full fibre rivals so far. We’ll also be interested to see if any homes end up with 2-3 ONTs installed on their inside wall.

Leeds is thus a huge test for whether or not a dense urban commercial market can truly maintain 2-3 Gigabit-capable broadband networks in the same space (models suggest it’s viable but this has yet to be truly tested). Sadly none of the operators release take-up statistics for specific urban areas and so we’ll be left to judge this using third-party data (we think it’s wise to allow 12-24 months post-build for take-up to grow before judging).