£24m Cityfibre 1Gb FTTH Broadband Build Progress in Ipswich

Full fibre developer Cityfibre appears to have recently started the build phase of their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) based broadband ISP network in the Suffolk (England) town of Ipswich, which is expected to cost the operator around £24 million to complete by the autumn of 2022.

Yesterday we reported that another Suffolk town – Bury St Edmunds – had recently started its FTTH build under Cityfibre’s commercial investment (here). Similarly Ipswich’s new network will also be underpinned by the same 114km long Dark Fibre network, which was constructed as part of an earlier (separate) agreement to connect public sector sites across 10 of the county’s towns with the support of public funding (here).

As usual all of this forms part of the operator’s wider £4bn UK investment project, which aims to cover around 1 million homes and businesses by the end of 2021 and then 8 million in the future (expected to be largely completed by the end of 2025). At present some 62 UK cities and towns have been identified for their roll-out plan (here) and we expect this to hit 100+ in the future, once the FibreNation plan has been fully integrated.

The £24m FTTH build in Ipswich is being supported by civil engineering partner VolkerSmart Technologies, which only secured the contract at the end of February 2020. Meanwhile reports from local residents have now helped us to confirm that local construction work has recently begun, which initially seems to focus on the central north western half of the town (pictured top).

Cityfibre also appears to be making some use of Openreach’s (BT) existing telegraph poles (PIA / DPA), as can be seen in the adjacent picture. Otherwise the main works are expected to include excavating 300,000m of new trenches and installing ducting, before blowing, splicing and finally testing the new fibre optic cables.

In terms of local competition, Virgin Media’s soon-to-be 1Gbps capable broadband network already covers the vast majority of the town, while Openreach’s rival FTTP network only exists in a few tiny patches but they do have a sizeable level of hybrid fibre G.fast coverage (330Mbps capable for some but real speeds are often much slower).

As usual Cityfibre’s new network will be sold to local homes via Vodafone’s comparatively cheap UK ISP Gigafast Broadband packages (set to be joined by TalkTalk in the future).