CityFibre Spend £1.5m to Extend Peterborough’s FTTP Broadband

CityFibre has announced that they will invest an additional £1.5m to boost the coverage of their original £30m project in the Cambridgeshire city of Peterborough, which was one of their first deployments of a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network with UK ISP partner Vodafone (plus TalkTalk).

The original rollout forms part of their on-going £4bn investment programme (here and here), which currently aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 (they’ve already done 500,000 premises) and then 8 million across 100+ cities and towns (c.30% of the UK) – the latter target is planned to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025.

The FTTP deployment phase for CityFibre’s Peterborough project started all the way back in July 2018 and the first customers then went live, via Vodafone’s associated Gigafast Broadband packages, all the way back in February 2019 (here). Since then the operator has managed to cover well over half of the city, but they’re still a long way from being able to claim true city-wide coverage.

Now, with “huge demand for full fibre” services, the villages of Glinton and Eye are also being added to the rollout, with work starting in the areas this month. As part of that CityFibre has increased their investment in the project by an additional £1.5m. Meanwhile the civil engineering is being handled by the Granemore Group.

Rebecca Stephens, CityFibre’s City Manager for Peterborough, said:

“We’re making huge strides in delivering Full Fibre to homes and businesses across Peterborough, and we’re thrilled to be able to bring our best-in-class network to include those living in the villages of Glinton and Eye.

At CityFibre, we pride ourselves on being agile and flexible. There is clear demand in these villages for Full Fibre and we’re now working quickly to ensure premises in both villages can access our network later this year.”

One other interesting development in this article is that TalkTalk’s new “Future Fibre” broadband packages will also become available to residents in the two villages, which marks one of the provider’s first forays outside their old FibreNation patch of coverage.