CityFibre and the Crawley Borough Council (CBC) have today reached a new “blanket wayleave agreement“, which will make it easier for the UK operator to extend their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network in the West Sussex town to cover 9,000 council-owned homes.
The operator, which is working alongside local contractor Lanes-i, started their £23m rollout across Crawley at the end of last year (here). The initial work is now almost complete in the Langley Green area, and they’re currently in the process of moving south towards Gossops Green, with Northgate and Three Bridges also earmarked for construction later this year.
Once the entire build has been completed in 2023, “almost every home and business” in Crawley will have access to their full fibre broadband. Crawley’s new network is not yet live but once activated, services will be available from an increasing range of broadband ISPs including Giganet and No One.
As usual this deployment forms part of their wider £4bn programme, which aims to cover 1 million UK premises with their FTTP network by the end of 2021 (over 650,000 have already been reached) and then 8 million premises are expected to be “substantially completed” across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK – by the end of 2025 (here). CityFibre may soon extend this target to 10m premises (here).
What does a blanket wayleave agreement mean here? Most of the 9000 will be houses not flats, so wayleaves to houses are normally given as part of the householders contract agreement for service. In other words they are not a problem to anyone wanting to serve, if the council though is planning to make that blanket wayleave exclusive to Cityfibre then it’s nothing to celebrate, showing Cityfibre and Crawley Council in the worst light. Just another monopolist trying to stop competitors- like Openreach