Cityfibre Nears 300,000 UK Full Fibre Premises Build Milestone UPDATE

The latest independent data has estimated that Cityfibre’s £4bn programme, which aims to roll-out a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network to cover 8 million UK premises (hopes to be substantially completed by the end of 2025), has now reached a total of 279,801 premises passed.

At present Phase One of Cityfibre’s deployment has already committed upwards of £500m to cover a “minimum” of 1 million homes and businesses by the end of 2021 (here). The rollout for this started very gradually at the end of 2018 and is currently still ramping-up, albeit likely to be slowed by the impact of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) in 2020.

Since then there’s been a big change because Cityfibre recently completed the acquisition of TalkTalk’s rival FibreNation project (here), which at the time had already covered most of York and a big chunk of Dewsbury with their own Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

Sadly Cityfibre won’t tell us how many premises passed they’ve covered so far due to “commercial reasons” (other operators don’t seem to have this problem), only that they’re currently active in 20 out of the 62 UK cities and towns currently being targeted for the project (the build is eventually expected to reach 100 cities and towns, once FibreNation’s plan is fully integrated).

Thankfully Andrew over at Thinkbroadband was able to help fill in some of the blanks via his latest independent modelling, which reveals that Cityfibre has now delivered an estimated 279,801 premises passed. The figure splits down as 84,953 from the FibreNation (FN) side and 194,848 from Cityfibre.

The TBB data only includes areas where they can confirm Cityfibre’s network as being live for service, thus it’s plausible that the operator’s own internal figures may have already hit the 300,000 mark.

Cityfibre’s £4bn Project – Build Progress
February 2019 – 25,445 Premises
August 2019 – 70,748 Premises
October 2019 – 100,692 Premises
April 2020 – 279,801 Premises (194,848 excluding FN)

At the last update we estimated that, between February and August 2019, the operator had achieved a build rate of roughly 7,550 premises per month over a period of six months, which increased to approximately 15,000 premises passed per month (double the prior rate) between August and the end of October 2019.

Excluding FN, if we only look at the build through November 2019 to April 2020 – roughly reflecting a period of five and a half months – then Cityfibre by itself has added about 94,000 premises or a build rate of c.17,000 per month (NOTE: COVID-19 may well have impacted the past four weeks).

Last October 2019 we estimated that, assuming they’d been able to start at a full build rate in 2019, then over 3 years Cityfibre would have needed to deliver c.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 now need to reach an even faster deployment rate in the near future and we’re still a long way from that.

The addition of FN should help to mitigate this, at least in the short term, but every operator is likely to feel some impact from the COVID-19 crisis. The Government has allowed full fibre builds to continue, but that’s less relevant if other parts of your supply and administration chain are still being slowed or have ground to a halt.

Likewise the workforce will be impacted to some degree by the lockdown (i.e. some people will be ill and need to self-isolate for longer than usual, while others will have children to monitor etc.). The looming economic crisis is another factor that could be hard to gauge, with investors likely to become more cautious. But on the upside full fibre projects remain attractive and well supported by the Government.

UPDATE

Please note that since writing this article it’s become clear that TBB made a mistake and double mapped FibreNation’s primary coverage in York, thus the figure is perhaps closer to 40k than 84k.