CityFibre UK Starts 1Gbps Fibre Broadband Rollout in Bath

CityFibre has today announced the start of their “city-wide” £25m investment to deploy a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the Somerset city of Bath, but they’ll be entering into an increasingly competitive market with several other gigabit-capable rivals.

As usual this deployment forms part of their wider £4bn programme, which 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 8m target aims to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025, and they may yet extend it to 10m premises (here).

The civil engineering side of this rollout is being conducted by Kier Group, which are also working with CF on similar builds in Cheltenham, Gloucester, Worcester and Weston-Super-Mare. The first premises to benefit from this will be in the Weston area of the city (likely to go live later this year) and the full deployment should complete by the end of 2023.

Each area in the city will usually take a few weeks to complete and construction teams will typically only be outside each home for 2-3 days. CityFibre will be in touch by post ahead of any work starting.

Neil Madle, CityFibre’s City Manager for Bath, said:

“Bath is a historic city most often associated with the likes of Jane Austen and its Roman Baths, but it’s also a forward-looking area with one of the fastest growing tech economies in the UK. I’m immensely proud to see work getting underway in Bath today as it means businesses and residents will soon have access to the best infrastructure available. 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 and underpin the city’s digital ambitions.”

However, CityFibre’s announcement comes only a week after rival operator Truespeed confirmed the start of their own FTTP build for Bath (here), which will also include the surrounding areas of Keynsham, Saltford and South Widcombe. On top of that the city has already been partly covered by Virgin Media’s gigabit-capable network and Openreach have separately been expanding their FTTP rollout too.

Bath is a beautiful location, although it’s not as densely packed as some cities, and it thus remains unclear whether the area can support four gigabit-capable rivals in close proximity. Much may depend upon how much those operators either avoid or overbuild each other.