Cityfibre Start 1Gb Home Broadband Build in Bury St Edmunds
Cityfibre has today announced that they’ve already started construction of their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network in the Suffolk (England) town of Bury St Edmunds (not to be confused with Bury near Manchester), which was only very recently added (here) to their £4bn UK roll-out plan.
The new infrastructure will no doubt be underpinned by the operator’s 114km long Dark Fibre network, which was part of an earlier (separate) and publicly funded agreement to connect public sector sites across 10 towns in Suffolk (here). By comparison the new investment of £8m represents a commercial project to help reach individual homes and businesses in Bury St Edmunds.
Work on the new FTTH network has already begun on the East side of the town near Cattishall and along Mount Road, as well as around Symonds Road near the A14. Cityfibre has appointed civil engineering firm Lite Access to handle the construction and, as usual, Vodafone will eventually supply local homes via their Gigafast Broadband packages (set to be joined by TalkTalk in the future).
We usually expect Cityfibre to target around 85% or greater coverage of every city or town they enter, although they haven’t said exactly how many premises will benefit or when the local deployment will complete.
Charles Kitchin, CityFibre’s City Manager for Bury St Edmunds, said:
“Full Fibre connectivity and next generation broadband services will transform the lives of those in Bury St Edmunds. This goes far beyond simply helping households access the latest entertainment at lightning speed. The benefits are far deeper, from enabling smart home technology to giving people the freedom to work from home with ease.
As well as enhancing our home lives, CityFibre’s full fibre network will give the town’s business community the platform they need to realise their growth ambitions. By connecting properties at up to 1000Mbps we’re putting Bury firmly in the top tier of all UK cities for connectivity and establishing it as a globally competitive digital destination.”
John Griffiths, Leader of West Suffolk Council, said:
“We are delighted with this private investment by CityFibre which came about because of the decision by Suffolk Public Sector Leaders to invest in improving the connectivity between the public sector buildings in Suffolk.
What this now means is greater private investment to deliver future-proof digital infrastructure for residents and businesses across Bury St Edmunds. CityFibre’s full fibre network will be vital, particularly as we look ahead beyond the current coronavirus crisis and to how we re-establish our ways of life, building in, wherever possible, greater resilience and diversity to our economy.”
As usual all of this forms part of the operator’s £4bn investment programme, which aims to cover around 1 million premises 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.
In terms of local competition, cable operator Virgin Media has no presence at all in the town and Openreach only has a few small patches of FTTP, which exist mostly around the odd business area, a new build home development and a few homes near to the town’s central area. But they do have quite a big deployment of 330Mbps capable (for some) hybrid fibre G.fast technology.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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I find it crazy that the villages on the outskirts of Bury St Edmunds barely have basic internet speeds and yet the focus is on speeding up the internet in town? I know that the focus is on pleasing the many rather than the few but some of us in the villages like myself have connections so bad that we cant even have more than two people connected at once! My Download speed is 13.83 Mb/s and they’re worried about getting town up to 1000Mb/s!!! Incredibly frustrating.
Unfortunately it’s sheer economics. They are using their existing backbone so why bother spending money connecting up rural areas (where the residents will most probably jump at the chance) when doing it in town is 10-20 times cheaper? There won’t be 10-20 times pickup in customers in rural areas, especially when population densities are taken into account.
Express an interest in County Broadband, undertaking detailed design work in Norfolk following success in attracting sufficient interest, and building in Essex.
The more that express an interest the more commercially viable the build programme becomes. Already serving remote villages in Essex with full fibre and have some existing customers on wireless.
Today en masse workmen arrived, in haste, and some with radios at full blast. Deposited street barricades and other items clearly intended for forthcoming work. In this brief visit the noise, and lack of driving care was awful. Let’s hope the contractor undertakes the works with much greater sympathy to us poor residents than the advance guard has.
I know I am a grumpy old man but it’s bad enough with coronavirus let alone a seemingly (from today’s experience) cowboy contractors.
Hickling Drive, Bury St Edmunds.