CityFibre Start GBP21m FTTP Broadband Rollout for Worcester

CityFibre UK has today confirmed that they’ve started work on their new £21m project to build a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the cathedral city of Worcester in Worcestershire (England), which is home to a population of over 100,000.

The project forms part of CF’s wider £4bn investment programme, which ultimately aims 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). The latter target is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025 and the operator may yet grow their plan to 10m premises (here).

The civil engineering side of this project is being carried out by Kier Group, which are also working with CF on similar builds in Cheltenham, Gloucester, Bath and Weston-Super-Mare. The first premises to benefit from this network will be those around the London Road area, which are due to be followed by others in the Redhill, Whittington and South Warndon areas.

Each area will usually take a few weeks to complete, however, construction teams will typically only be outside each home for 2-3 days and CityFibre will be in touch by post ahead of any work starting. Finally, and assuming all goes to plan, the local rollout is expected to be completed by “early 2024,” although we’d expect the first services to go live later this year.

Neal Wright, CityFibre’s City Manager for Worcester, said:

“I’m immensely proud to see work getting underway in Worcester today. This is the start of an exciting new chapter for the city as it gets ready to thrive in the digital age. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing how Worcester will use its new citywide infrastructure to help it achieve its carbon neutral ambitions and make the city a greener, healthier and safer place for all.

Once Worcester’s digital infrastructure rollout is complete, it can fully reap the benefits of green innovations such as smart energy and waste management systems which are all underpinned by full fibre connectivity. It’s important to remember that any short-term disruption will pay off tremendously in the long-term, once the network’s built, it will serve the community’s connectivity needs for decades to come.”

We think it’s fair to say that Worcester isn’t as well populated by gigabit-capable rivals as other UK cities, but at the same time CityFibre won’t have the local market all to themselves. Openreach has been rolling out their own FTTP network across various parts of the city and in other areas they also have some “ultrafast” capable G.fast.

Meanwhile, OFNL has a few small full fibre deployments on new build sites. We also note that Gigaclear have been getting gradually closer to the city, but at present they show no signs of entering it. Finally, Hyperoptic did once mention building into some MDUs around the city, but we’ve struggled to find any such sites.