Cityfibre Confirm 62 UK Areas for £4bn FTTH Broadband Rollout

Full fibre builder Cityfibre has today confirmed that an additional 36 UK cities and towns have been added to their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband roll-out programme (total of 62), which working with ISPs like Vodafone and TalkTalk aims to eventually cover 8 million premises by 2025 or a bit later.

In case anybody has forgotten, Cityfibre’s project originally started in late 2018 (here) – supported by UK ISP partner Vodafone and substantial investment from Goldman Sachs – with a plan to spend £2.5bn on deploying their 1Gbps FTTH network to reach a “minimum” of 1 million homes and businesses across 12 cities and towns by the end of 2021 (c.£500m Phase One), then 5 million premises in 37 cities and towns by the end of 2025 (c.20% of the current UK broadband market).

Since then the operator has been busy ramping-up their civil engineering build across their Phase One cities. On top of that they recently spent £200m (cash) to acquired TalkTalk’s FibreNation network (here), which had already largely covered the city of York (c.50,000 premises) and was busy deploying to several large towns (Dewsbury, Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon).

As a result of the above deal Cityfibre raised their planned investment to £4bn and aims to reach 8 million UK premises (c.30% of the market). Vodafone has also relaxed their exclusivity deal (they now get 12 months in each location) so that TalkTalk and other UK ISPs can hop onto the new network (Sky Broadband also exists but only under the FibreNation footprint – pending talks).

The recent changes have meant that the operator needed to update their plans and today’s announcement represents the next phase of that process. Essentially Cityfibre has added another 36 cities and towns to their confirmed roll-out plan (many more will be added in the future), which brings the total number of confirmed roll-out locations so far to 62 (reflecting 5 million homes).

Greg Mesch, CEO at Cityfibre, said:

“Britain’s need for a world-class digital infrastructure has never been greater which is why we stand firmly behind the Government’s plan for nationwide coverage by 2025. Full fibre will play a critical role in levelling-up the UK and so today we are accelerating our plans, bringing full fibre to more towns and cities, even faster.”

Oliver Dowden MP, DCMS Secretary of State, said:

“We want to make sure every corner of the country benefits from world-class, gigabit speed broadband, so it is great to see CityFibre expanding out into 36 more towns and cities.

We are working closely with industry to push ahead with nationwide rollout and investing £5 billion so the hardest-to-reach areas aren’t left behind.”

A related process is now underway to award £1.5bn in new construction contracts by the summer 2020 (finding enough skilled engineers is a particularly difficult job these days) and network build is being brought forward in the “vast majority of these towns and cities” to start the end of the year. At present Cityfibre has network construction underway in 16 towns and cities, with Gigabit-speed services live in 11.

However Cityfibre’s effort has also come under increasing pressure from rivals. On the one hand we have Virgin Media, which is in the process of upgrading their existing network to offer 1Gbps speeds and that is due to complete by 2021 (here). On the other hand we have Openreach’s (BT) ambition to make FTTP available to 15 million premises by around 2025.

Not to mention lots of alternative network providers, such as Hyperoptic, G.Network and others that are building in some of the same urban areas. A few of these may overbuild Cityfibre’s new network, although they all have different pros and cons. Suffice to say that there’s plenty of competition, although that will also make it harder for some operators to attract subscribers on to specific networks (expect winners and losers from this race).

At the time of writing Vodafone still offers the only related Gigafast Broadband packages on Cityfibre’s network for homes, which is priced from £28 per month for an unlimited 100Mbps (symmetric speed) service on an 18 month contract, including free installation (you also get a good wireless router). The plans rise to £40 per month for their top 900Mbps (Gigabit) tier and we’re currently waiting to see TalkTalk’s package.

New towns and cities announced for full fibre deployment (36):

• Barnsley (£32m)
• Bath
• Blackpool (£60m)
• Bognor Regis
• Bracknell (£20m)
• Brighton & Hove (£80m)
• Bury St Edmunds (£8m)
• Chatham (part of the £40m Medway build)
• Cheltenham (£30m)
• Chester (£23m)
• Chichester
• Christchurch
• Crawley (£23m)
• Dundee (£40m)
• Eastbourne (£26m)
• Gateshead
• Gillingham (part of the £40m Medway build)
• Glasgow (£?)
• Gloucester (£31m)
• Halifax c.51,000 premises
• Horsham
• Littlehampton
• Maidenhead (£14m)
• Middlesbrough (£42m)
• Norwich (£50m) c.100,000 premises (2.5 year roll-out – starting end of 2020)
• Nottingham (£117m)
• Poole
• Portsmouth (£32m)
• Preston (£30m)
• Reading (£58m)
• Sheffield (£115m)
• Solihull
• Stoke on Trent
• Weston-super-Mare (£22m)
• Wolverhampton (£50m)
• Worcester (£25m – £35m)

SEPT 2020 Addition: Renfrewshire (£40m) – Paisley, Renfrew and Johnstone.

OCT 2020 Addition: Plymouth (£52m).

NOV 2020 Addition: North Tyneside (£50m).

NOV 2020 Addition (via FibreNation): Bolton (£37m)

DEC 2020 Addition (via FibreNation): Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon (£46m combined)

JAN 2021 Addition: Sunderland (£62m)

Towns and cities previously announced (26):

• Aberdeen (£40m)
• Adur & Worthing (£25m)
• Batley – 6,000 premises by end of 2022
• Bournemouth (£38m) – Also owns a legacy FTTH network to c.20k premises
• Bradford (£75m)
• Cambridge (£20m) – c.60,000 premises
• Coventry (£60m)
• Derby (£45m)
• Dewsbury (£40m) – 61,000 premises by end of 2022
• Doncaster (£25m)
• Edinburgh (£100m)
• Huddersfield (£30m)
• Inverness (£20m)
• Ipswich (£24m)
• Leeds (£120m)
• Leicester (£80m)
• Lowestoft (£14m)
• Milton Keynes (£40m)
• Newcastle-upon-Tyne (£69m) – c.103,000 premises
• Northampton (£40m)
• Peterborough (£30m)
• Rotherham (£29m)
• Slough (£24m)
• Southend (£35m) – c.100,000 premises
• Stirling (£10m)
• Swindon (£40m)

At this point our eagle-eyed readers might notice that a few locations are missing from the list that Cityfibre originally announced in 2018, including Bristol, Harrogate, Manchester, Southampton and Wakefield. Quite why all of these weren’t confirmed today is unclear, but we can guess at some of the reasons and they may be confirmed in future updates (we eventually expect about 100 cities and towns to be included).

For example, Harrogate, York, Knaresborough and Ripon all come under the FibreNation network and the merger of that is on-going (i.e. we should see those three confirmed in the future). Admittedly Dewsbury also belongs in that club, but Cityfibre had already confirmed that location last year and so they couldn’t very well remove it this time around.

We’re less certain why Bristol, Manchester, Southampton and Wakefield have been missed off the list, although some of those already have three Gigabit broadband providers building (e.g. in Southampton there’s toob, Virgin Media and Openreach). Realistically it is significantly more difficult for a fourth altnet provider to enter an area with that many players already present.

UPDATE 8:41am

A little bit of related news has just come in. VolkerSmart Technologies (VolkerHighways) has just secured the £24m civil engineering contract to build Cityfibre’s FTTH network in Ipswich, which they said would be completed by the autumn of 2022. The works will include excavating 300,000 metres of new trenches around the town and installing ducting, before blowing, splicing and finally testing the fibre optic cables.

UPDATE 9:33am

We have sought a bit of clarification from Cityfibre on a few of their targets. Apparently the initial expectation is still to cover at least 1 million premises by the end of 2021, while they hope to have “substantially completed” the 8 million by the end of 2025 (i.e. the roll-out may go on for longer than 2025, depending upon how they define “substantially“).

In addition, they confirmed that Harrogate, York, Knaresborough and Ripon have not yet been added to the plan as the FibreNation deal has yet to formally complete, but we can expect that by around the end of this month.