Cityfibre Working to Replace Existing UK FibreNation FTTP Kit

Cityfibre have recently begun replacing some fairly modern Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based gigabit broadband equipment in areas (e.g. York) that were originally built out by FibreNation (FN), back when the company was still owned by UK ISP TalkTalk.

Just to recap. Cityfibre purchased FibreNation from TalkTalk for £206m earlier this year and then promptly increased their own rollout strategy (here). At the time FN was either already deploying, or planning to deploy, their 1Gbps “Ultra Fibre Optic” network across various locations, such as York, Bolton, Dewsbury, Harrogate, Batley, Heckmondwike, Knaresborough and Ripon (York was their most mature deployment).

As part of that sale TalkTalk agreed to a new wholesale arrangement, which would see them maintain their current access to FibreNation’s network and also gain access to Cityfibre’s wider national FTTP network. Since then Cityfibre has largely kept the two networks separate (running in parallel), but that recently started to change.

The change was spotted after one of TalkTalk’s customers on TBB’s Forum, who was living in an area of York that had recently been covered by the UFO service, suddenly found that their order for the related full fibre package had been disrupted. A spokesperson for Cityfibre told ISPreview.co.uk: “[We’re] working to fully integrate the FibreNation footprint, making it available to all our customers as part of a single national network.”

We also queried whether this had anything to do with the fact that some of FN’s infrastructure contained kit from Huawei, which is classified as a “high risk” vendor by the Government. The spokesperson said, “CityFibre does not use Huawei equipment in our network. We have selected a number of other strategic equipment providers to help power our national rollout. We recently acquired a network containing a small amount of Huawei equipment, but it has always been our plan to remove this as we integrate the networks.”

The move to replace FN’s kit will probably, as above, create some limited disruption in affected areas (e.g. stalling new orders). However, Cityfibre said they expect to complete the replacement over the next 12 months, which also means that they’ll be able to fully integrate FN’s areas into their commercial, technical and operational footprint (i.e. it’ll be made available to serve “all” of Cityfibre’s customer verticals).