ISP Community Fibre Brings Full Fibre to 200,000 London Homes
London-focused broadband ISP CommunityFibre has announced that their 3Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network is now available to over 200,000 homes in the UK’s capital city, which represents a doubling of their coverage over the past year. On top of that their customer base has grown by 130% over the same period.
The operator’s network is currently available, and continuing to expand rapidly, in parts of Barnet, Brent, Camden, City of London, Croydon, Ealing, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Islington, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Richmond upon Thames, Southwark, Sutton, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth and Westminster.
Today’s news also supports the operator’s future coverage plan, which will see them deploy their “full fibre” infrastructure to reach 1 million UK premises (mostly in London) with their gigabit speed network by the end of 2023 – this is being supported by around £500m of private investment (here).
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Homes on their network are typically offered maximum broadband speeds of up to 3Gbps (most of these exist in large apartment blocks [MDUs], but they do serve a few houses [SDUs] too), while businesses can access the top 10Gbps service.
Graeme Oxby, CEO of Community Fibre, said:
“2020 was without a doubt an unprecedented and difficult year for many. Despite this, our teams have worked hard to provide high-quality, 100% full-fibre broadband to London communities. As a London-based company, we are proud to have reached this new milestone today and will keep pursuing our efforts to provide better connectivity to those who need it the most and connect up to a million properties across the city by 2023. These rollouts will not only cover social housing and large blocks of flats, our primary focus in the past, but also include individual properties and terraced houses.”
As a result of the operator’s rapid growth, an extra 1,000 jobs in London will have been created over the past year and this year to help deliver the network. Community Fibre added that they are also providing “free gigafast broadband connections” to 123 community centres across London and recently “became the first” fixed broadband ISP to offer 1-year of free 50Mbps internet connectivity – in conjunction with their social landlord partners – to vulnerable households in all of the boroughs they serve (here).
However, CommunityFibre are not the only player in London, with rivals such as Virgin Media, Hyperoptic, Openreach and G.Network all making investments into their own gigabit-capable network expansion projects.
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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Colour scheme of the van makes me think of milk chocolate….
From what I can see on thinkbroadband’s map, this CommuityFibre roll out is new build blocks of flats. Similar to Hyperoptic.
So for existing homes/street the only 500mbps+ option available is Virgin Media including their 1gig product.
My uncle and cousin brother live in old social housing blocks in Tower Hamlets and they have Community Fibre I am still waiting for fibre community in my block I am too in Tower Hamlets old block
They’ve actually just completed a build out in Waddon, Croydon (mostly semi-detached terraced houses) using Openreach poles so it’s not just blocks of flats now . This is great news for us because VM have let the network rot in this area, cabinets falling apart and very poor speeds at peak times.
@James
Very interesting.
I was aware they were starting SDU trials but hadn’t realised they had done any large areas.
I would guess they would target areas where VM are poor (wide selection of those around London) and OR’s offering is not great either. Should get good uptake from that!
OR are choosing some strange areas to cover. Realised the other day that they had done some streets in Balham that were all really old (pre war) ducted. Engineers out literally digging house by house to connect new 2″ draw ducts. That being said there were clearly a good few orders given the amount of blue rope sticking out from the pavement edge.
They were quite happy to install a connection in my old terraced flat last summer, although the availability checker still says even now that my address and those around it aren’t available.
Only found out they were in my area from a flyer through the door, and called on the off chance that they could help out. Had to pay the bit extra for a “business” connection in order for them to do the installation, but they didn’t charge to install and £56/month on a 12 month contract seems reasonable enough when I’m working from home anyway.
It’s not newly block of flats that they focus on mostly. But of-course it is easier for them to get wayleave access because newly built homes by default don’t have copper, therefore no FTTC, so FTTP is the only choice that the developer must choose. It is a great opportunity to expand their portfolio by targeting new builds but they are not going to achieve a million+ premises with new builds in a short time alone that’s impossible!
CommunityFibre and Hyperoptic tend to target large MDU’s where wayleave access is easily granted.
Example: Very old residential building 1965-1970 Petticoat Square, London, E1 7EB CommunityFibre – “Great news! You can get London’s fastest 100% full fibre broadband” Hyperoptic – Great news! Hyperoptic is available at …Petticoat Square, E1 7EB, LONDON.
I said it before many months ago and it turns out I am correct. Buildings that already have wayleave granted/ and or already have Hyperoptic or Openreach FTTP and vice-versa will tend to have newly overbuilds for CommunityFibre as well. Indeed this is true as this second overbuild for Petticoat Square Tower is thanks to City of London Corporation. I spotted their vans recently so that’s how I found out.
Now if I check my postcode and postcodes by my housing association EastendHomes e.g. This is what I now get from recently again. We’re not in your street yet “Good news, we will be building our network in your area.”
But of-course I’m not excited at all because I know my housing estate will not grant them wayleave naturally despite the fact that they are demonstrating an interest to build in my area.