CityFibre to Link 4500 Glasgow Social Housing Properties to FTTP
CityFibre has reached a new blanket wayleave (legal land / property access) agreement with the New Gorbals Housing Association, which will enable their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network to be extended across 4,500 social housing properties on the south side of Glasgow in Scotland.
The operator is already busy building their full fibre network across other parts of Glasgow, which forms part of their wider £4bn investment to cover 1 million UK premises with their alternative FTTP network by the end of 2021 (over 650,000 have already been reached) and then 8 million premises across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK (here) – by the end of 2025 or a little later.
Much of their work in Glasgow is currently being supported by civil engineering contractor PMK, although the operator hasn’t said precisely how much funding they’ve put into the city’s rollout. Kirsten Adams-MacKenzie, Vice-Chair of New Gorbals Housing Association, said: “It is crucial that our tenants have access to fast and reliable broadband at a reasonable price and we are delighted that CityFibre has chosen to invest in the area with these full fibre installations.”
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 and Linkedin.
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For CityFibre in Glasgow I am seeing a load of entries on Roadworks Scotland site near me that say as below – anyone know if this means they are building to houses in area? I can’t imagine there is this many mobile masts as there’s hundreds of entries in my local area – although curiously none in the 1-2 streets directly around me. Although I am in a semi-new build (2011) so hopefully it will reach me also via PIA and that’s why no roadworks listed.
‘Installing Fibre to Support Mobile Network – Excavate to Lay Approx 70M of Duct on FW and 8m of duct on CW’
They are building to houses. Or at least to the boundary where they put a wee connection point in the pavement ready to run from when you order. Agree, the roadworks entries are odd but they are also building to 5G masts. Have you done a postcode check on the CityFibre website? Is your semi-new road adopted by GCC? Although they do use PIA I’m told they still occasionally need to put a cabinet on the pavement. Fine if you are adopted, not if you road is still ‘private’.
Yeah I’m based in south Lanarkshire – seems no postcodes from south Lanarkshire get a successful result when running through the checker even when the map is showing them doing roadworks. Trying the closest postcode in Glasgow council area does show as coming soon though. Hopefully just an update needing to the map database. I think road must be adopted as it’s around 11 years old – we recently just got virgin enabled in our street – this is all via PIA no cabinet needed (as far as I can see).
A shame SLC don’t appear to have an online definitive map as do GCC. You have to go to the office to see your road status. https://www.southlanarkshire.gov.uk/info/200232/roads_lighting_and_pavements/328/adopted_roads You must be somewhere like Rutherglen, it seems CF are treating the area as if it were part of Glasgow (which it ought to be). If you email CF they are helpful, they’ll let you know why you’re missing from the postcode check. Didn’t know Virgin did PIA. Luck you though 😉 I don’t have any full fibre options.
Can someone clarify or bring light to something I’ve been wondering for a while now.
All these FTTP providers are building networks that are capable of 10gbps but they only seem to offer 1gbps as a residential service.
Why is this? Is it because they think consumers wouldn’t want to touch an expensive 10gbps service? Surely even offering some sort of package would get some subscribers at least.
Very few potential customers will have the equipment that could exploit such speeds. At the very least they’d need a router costing, even at the low end, thousands of pounds.
That’s because at present 10 Gbps is massively overkill for your average Jo Bloggs. According to TBB, around 80% of those in Openreach FTTP only areas take out the 80/20 tier or less. So never mind 10 GBPs, even 1 Gbps is overkill for your average punter as things stand.
As usual there’s a decision based on the balance of cost, demand and capacity or technical limitation that has to be made. Not to mention that most end-user hardware today, as well as remote internet services, would struggle to take even close to full use of 10Gbps if it was delivered.
So a network may be technically ready for 10Gbps (at least on the downstream side) and businesses might be able to order that, but it’s more about offering a future path to upgrades when the time is right than making it all available today. A 10Gbps package for homes today would be expensive to buy and somewhat pointless if you can’t make proper use of all that speed.
A few ISPs, such as B4RN, will give you 10Gbps today if you’re within their patch, but you’ll pay £150 per month and £360 for the router/install. And they’re at the cheap end of the scale.
There are a number of consumer routers that have a 2.5 GbE WAN connection and at least one 2.5GbE LAN connection. The top end Netgear WiFi 6 router even claims to have 10.8 Gbs WiFi bandwidth.
Maybe a 2.2 Gbps consumer package would be feasible right now.
A big part of it is the hardware that is placed into the network, both at the ISP end and the customer premises equipment.
Whilst the CityFibre network is able to handle 10Gbps over the GPON part of the link, the ONTs they are handing out are only capable of 1Gbps, and the backhaul back to their POPs may not be capable of 10Gbps per customer yet. Add to this that the ISPs using their network may also not have the routing and backhaul at the POPs to provide this service.
If demand is there, a large ISP such as Zen could likely convince CityFibre to start provisioning at 2, 5 or even 10Gbps for “power-users”, but I fear at present the cost is likely too high to make it feasible.
Once CityFibre are much further forward with their deployment, and people start getting used to having 1Gbps in their home (say, within the next 18-24 months) this may start to change.
The 10Gbps meaningless guff. Basically it means you have a piece of single mode fibre coming into your house for which as far as an internet connection goes is as good as it will ever get because “physics”. Currently there are products on the market that could at a very high price give you 10Gbps over that fibre. The next generation product that will offer 25Gbps over that fibre is in development. The fibre itself is good for *at least* 1Tbps.
I thought GPON was limited to ~2.4Gbps?
Silly question, but the fibre cable to the home could theoretically carry far more than 10gbs couldn’t it?
@jonathan we’re not talking about the fibre here though. We’re talking about the network as a whole, of which the fibre is but a single part. No one here is disputing the fact that the actual fibre cabling can go faster than 10Gbps – it’s just that’s where the commonly available GPON equipment draws the lines currently. It’s also a logical place to draw the line, since 10GbE networking hardware is now just about becoming affordable at the consumer level, with higher speed equipment still the preserve of datacentre/specialist installations and the most avid of enthusiasts.
@ben it depends which GPON standard the network uses.
the headline says ‘CityFibre to Link 4500 Glasgow **Social Housing** Properties to FTTP’ and the start of the article says ‘CityFibre has reached a new blanket wayleave (legal land / property access) agreement with the **New Gorbals Housing Association**, which will enable their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises’
As I new it housing Association meant poor people, how are they going to afford the proper prices for 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises? Also I didn’t think that Gorbals was an afluent part of Glasgow
The Gorbals is nicer than it was. Not everyone is poor. Everyone deserves access to good quality internet, and that’s actually a Glasgow City Council policy. You don’t have to take a gigabit service, slower speeds are available if that’a all you need or can afford But the CityFibre service is usually cheaper than Openreach’s. Zen offer a 1G (symmetrical) service for £40 on CityFibre or £60 on Openreach (asymmetrical).
Starting to feel like this is Fibre to the Press Release, as the CF rollout in my town is so slow.
They have enabled a few properties, but that was months ago and no extra since despite tons of work. Will they ever finish?!