ISP TalkTalk UK Extend 506Mbps FTTP Broadband to Ipswich

Budget UK ISP TalkTalk has today announced that their new CityFibre and Openreach based ‘Future Fibre‘ packages, which offer average top speeds of up to 506Mbps via Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, have now become available to homes in the Suffolk (England) town of Ipswich.

CityFibre are currently investing £4bn to cover around 1 million UK premises with their alternative FTTP network by the end of 2021 (650,000 have already completed), which will then rise to 8 million 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. Meanwhile, Openreach plan to cover 20 million premises by 2025-30 (4.5 million are already completed).

Earlier this year TalkTalk, which has a wholesale agreement with both CF and Openreach, began to extend the CF side of their ‘Future Fibre‘ package into some aforementioned network areas, including Aberdeen, Bolton, Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Adur and Worthing. Today they’ve extended this again to include Ipswich. Openreach also has some coverage in Ipswich, but it’s very limited.

The interesting thing about today’s news is that TalkTalk seem to be happy to take FTTP from either CF or Openreach in the same town, whereas before it seemed like they’d only choose one or the other for each location (depending upon availability). At the moment this isn’t such a problem because both operators have largely avoided each other, but future overbuild may challenge that (we’d assume TT would preference CF’s affordability).

Charles Kitchin, City Manager for CityFibre in Ipswich, said:

“We are delighted to be working with TalkTalk to offer people the opportunity to access the full fibre network we have been building in Ipswich. We have made real strides in bringing state-of-the-art digital connectivity to homes since beginning our build and look forward to even more homes having access to fast and reliable digital connectivity in the future.”

Keiran Wines, Openreach’s Regional Partnership Director, said:

“We’re proud to be supporting TalkTalk with access to our network. Openreach is the UK’s largest broadband infrastructure provider with millions of households and businesses using our infrastructure every day. No-one else is building full fibre faster than us; 42,000 premises each week and we’ve just reached 4.5 million in total.”

Prices tend to start at £32 per month for 150Mbps (symmetric) on an 18-month term (plus £4.95 postage) or £40 per month for 500Mbps (the pricing between Openreach and CF is currently aligned), although you’ll get slower upload speeds on the Openreach side.

By around the end of this year we’d expect TalkTalk to become available across the whole of CityFibre’s network and the same goes for other ISPs.