Cityfibre Commit £50m to Blanket North Tyneside in 1Gbps Fibre UPDATE
Fibre optic developer Cityfibre UK has today announced they will invest £50m to cover “nearly every home and business” in North Tyneside (Tyne and Wear, England) with access to their new gigabit-capable and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network.
Local contractor IQA Elecnor has been appointed to build the new network, with work being due to commence next month. All of this should complement their nearby deployment to 103,000 premises in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which is also costing Cityfibre an investment of around £50m.
The new project forms part of the operator’s wider £4bn investment plan (here and here), which currently aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 and then 8 million across 100+ cities and towns (c.30% of the UK) – the latter target is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025.
As usual the operator is being supported by residential ISP partners like Vodafone and TalkTalk, although we don’t yet know which of those will serve this area.
Jason Legget, City Manager at CityFibre, said:
“We’ve made great progress already in the region with our work in Newcastle and it’s exciting to now look to our £50m North Tyneside Full Fibre investment. In collaboration with North Tyneside Council, we are looking forward to transforming digital infrastructure; particularly at a time when connectivity, and indeed best-in-class Full Fibre, could not be more significant.”
Antonio Henarejos, MD of IQA Elecnor, said:
“We are pleased to work on this additional contract for CityFibre in North Tyneside, following our previous work rolling out a Full Fibre network in Newcastle. It’s great to be part of an enterprise that transforms communities’ digital experiences, by giving them more reliable broadband.”
As usual Cityfibre will not have North Tyneside all to itself. In terms of gigabit-capable rivals, Virgin Media is already present across most of the same area, albeit with some big gaps, and Openreach’s FTTP network has a much smaller level of coverage.
UPDATE 1st March 2021
Construction work has finally commenced, albeit a few months later than was initially promised last year, in the North Shields’ Riverside area.
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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But, why? It’s already drowning in Virgin DOCSIS that’s capable of 1G, and BT’s FTTC with FTTP in some areas. What are Cityfibre planning to achieve by wasting their money on this area?
Not everybody wants to be locked to Virgin Media’s closed network with its slower uploads. On top of that, the more competition you have, the less regulation is required and the more competitive the pricing and service choice environment for consumers. Plus, without the forward motion of competition I doubt Openreach would be deploying FTTP quite as far or as rapidly as they are now.
Most dense urban markets should be able to sustain 3-4 players at the infrastructure level.
VM isn’t yet Gigabit capable in Newcastle is it?
@Olly
Cityfibre, backed by Goldman Sachs among others, plan to disrupt openreach’s wholesale business by building a large scale network of their own in the lower cost urban areas. Their goal is to create a mini Openreach with lower costs and less regulation, and undercut openreach’s wholesale prices in their service area.
They believe this will be attractive to the likes of sky, talk talk and Vodafone who all see BT as a competitor as well as a wholesale supplier.
Cityfibre’s investors don’t think they’re wasting their money overbuilding areas that openreach would classify as commercially viable or that already have VM. It’s just a different business model to most altnets, and one that won’t ultimately add much to the UK’s gigabit footprint because almost every property they target would have been targeted by openreach commercial rollout in the next few years and the majority are also served by VM.
Virgins coverage is sparser than you seem to think, comparing FTTC to FTTP via OR or anyone else seems flawed. I also don’t see this as wasting money via over-build, I see it as people having choice, why would City Fibre or anyone else ignore a potentially lucrative area that has a high customer density and lower build cost per property passed just because someone else has covered some parts of it? Competition & choice = Good.
They’ll likely not struggle for customers.
The Openreach FTTP deployment is currently very thin, and the plans to expand it soon are leaving some pretty big gaps.
Similar for Virgin Media, there are big gaps in the coverage, and the network here is not gigabit capable yet, though I’d imagine it won’t be long.
As a Virgin Media customer, I’d gladly jump to this – Virgin are a pretty awful company to deal with, their disproportionate upload speeds are a pain for me working from home permanently, latency on DOCSIS is pretty bad and the whole Pumagate thing with the Hub3 (and to a lesser extent the Hub4) is just dire. We’re also not in an Openreach FTTP area, and we’re also not in one of the areas about to be built out. FTTC with Openreach gets us 40Mbps if we’re lucky.
Your frustration is understandable Olly, but this is the invisible hand of the market for you – gliding towards dense consumer populations and fatter bottom lines.
Sod all for connectivity disparity.
Well in the past few weeks we have had Openreach doing a survey in the street for FTTP. Virginmedia also surveying and who apparently who have permission to use Openreach infrastructure so they don’t have to dig the roads and now announcement from CityFibre. So looks like I could have three options hopefully in the not too distant future!
Same here, I already have Virgin, Openreach are soon to begin their build, now Cityfibre, spoiled for choice now. Great position to be in re deals, hopefully these.providers will be aggressive with their packages.
Amazing how many times one company can announce the same investment.
North Tyneside Newcastle
This is their first announcement.