CityFibre Deal Brings FTTP Broadband to 18,000 Citizen Tenants

Some 18,000 tenants and customers of Citizen, a social housing provider in the West Midlands (England) city of Coventry, look set to gain access to a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network as part of a new agreement with CityFibre.

The city of Coventry was one of the first to benefit from the start of CityFibre’s wider project, which ultimately aims to cover 1 million UK premises with their alternative FTTP network by the end of 2021 (almost 650,000 have already been completed) and then 8 million premises across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK (here). The latter target is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025.

CityFibre is investing £60m to support their deployment across the city, but in order to reach as far as possible they also need to extend into social housing estates, which tend to benefit from special access (wayleave) agreements in order to make the rollout as fast and as cost-effective as possible.

Liz Bloomfield, Portfolio Manager at Citizen, said:

“It’s great news that around 18,500 of our customers and tenants will have access to next-generation digital connectivity, which is increasingly important to so many aspects of our life, from working effectively at home and socialising to entertainment.

It’s vital that our homes have access to the best broadband available and I’m really pleased we’re already working towards our homes having futureproof Gigabit-capable broadband speeds.”

The announcement represents another positive development for the operator, although what we aren’t told is how long it will take for the new full fibre network to reach across the 18,000 tenants. The local network itself is being supported by various UK ISPs, such as Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), TalkTalk, Zen Internet and others.