Cityfibre to Start £22m Weston-super-Mare FTTP Broadband Build
Cityfibre has today confirmed that they intend to invest £22m in order to deploy a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset (England), with the build itself starting in January 2021.
The work forms part of the operator’s wider £4bn investment programme (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.
The contracted civil engineering firm for the project, Kier Group, has already begun detailed planning in the area, ahead of the rollout getting under way next month. As usual the aim will be to reach “nearly every home and business” in the town (they usually target 85%+ FTTP coverage).
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Kathryn Askew Smith, Cityfibre’s Local City Manager, said:
“This year, we’ve all come to appreciate the importance of fast, reliable broadband and CityFibre’s investment in the town will play a crucial role in growing and protecting the local economy. Fast and reliable fibre connections will make the town an even more desirable place to visit, live and work as our requirement for robust connectivity is only set to increase.”
Cityfibre’s new network will however face some local competition from gigabit-capable rivals, particularly from Virgin Media, which has been busy extending their own FTTP build across a large part of the town. Openreach also have some moderate full fibre coverage in the area and there are a few tiny patches from OFNL too. Meanwhile Gigaclear and Truespeed are both nearby, but neither appear to have entered the town itself.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Good news for people living in the town, but probably irrelevant for those of us in the surrounding villages. Openreach and vintage twisted copper wires for the foreseeable future here.
@peter Gigaclear and Truespeed are building quite rapidly now in the area, they’re currently both digging around Yatton, I’d imagine they get down the A370 towards Weston next year
Maybe you could try USO of CFP?
This will be good. We have had Virgin cable partial parts of Weston but leaving out random areas. 3 roads down have Virgin but we are stuck on FTTC hitting a maximum of 20/1mbps.
Hoping they have a deployment plan available soon
I’m guessing… leaving out random less populated areas.
Looks like another company taking the low hanging fruit for FTTP leaving 15% unserviced. They should be made to include all properties not leaving the expensive ones for Openreach or for those communities to have to try CFP or USO☹️ UK Gov get a grip on this please
Yeah, Virgin recently cabled the most densely populated new build areas of Worle, completely leaving out the rest.
Great news for local businesses and I look forward to receiving a network/ fibre map so we know where to expect it.
I doubt they will produce that level of detail. Case of when it comes it’s there.
Will be interesting to see how far VM go. Doing Worle north of the High Street currently. Maybe they will then go to the north of north Worle.
Well said John Bedale. The government must get a grip or we risk a repeat of the cable scandal where people have no choice of isp. Virginia customers will understand.