CityFibre Set to Begin £50m Norwich FTTP Broadband Rollout UPDATE
CityFibre has today confirmed that they’ll begin the £50m rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the Norfolk city of Norwich during “early” September 2021, which follows the appointment of Telec Networks to conduct the civil engineering work.
The operator states that “almost every home and business in the city” will benefit from their rollout, which has previously been touted alongside a coverage figure of 100,000 premises. As part of this work, Telec Networks are currently looking to recruit new members to its team, with 100 jobs set to be created during the life of the project.
All of this forms part of Cityfibre’s £4bn commitment, 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). But CityFibre may yet extend this target to 10m premises (here).
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Charles Kitchin, CityFibre’s City Manager for Norwich, said:
“The next chapter in Norwich’s story starts here. Our builders will soon get to work on a city-wide full fibre network – and we think people will be blown away by the difference it will make, both now and for generations to come. We cannot wait for residents and businesses to see what is possible with digital connectivity that propels you forward rather than holds you back.
The appointment of a contractor is a major step forward for us as we prepare to bring full fibre connectivity to the city at the same time as creating new jobs and opportunities. I look forward to working closely with Telec Networks, residents of Norwich and local authority partners to deliver this vital project which will future-proof the city’s digital infrastructure.”
The operator’s main competition for gigabit-capable broadband connectivity in the city will be from Virgin Media’s existing network, which already covers most of the area, and Openreach’s rapidly expanding FTTP deployment.
UPDATE 20th Sept 2021
Construction of the new full fibre network has finally started in the Catton Grove area. The first streets include those in and around Bullard Road, Woodcock Road, Palmer Road, Jewson Road, Aylsham Road and Weston Road. By the sounds of it the first ISPs to offer services in this location will be Air Broadband, InTouch Systems, and Giganet.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Until CityFibre give up their exclusivity contracts with the worst provider in the entire history of human civilisation (Vodafone) it’s pointless. It’s been over a year since they completed the construction in my part of Leeds yet they still aren’t allowing any other ISP’s to use it. We’re all waiting for some other decent ISP’s like Zen to launch here.
yeah agreed with this – I have Vodafone FTTC. The speeds etc are generally fine, reliable and price is good, the problem is with certain sites content loads extremely slow like IMGUR and other media hosting sites. I have turned off all content filtering etc but still seeing the same issues. Soon as I switch to 4G or other ISP connection problems disappear. They also don’t support things like IPv6. This is both using my own modem/router set-up and the bundled Vodafone router. In terms of their own router it’s pretty poor, I’m running Plex and internal LAN users can’t connect/find the server so had to switch to my own set-up.
By the end of this year Vodafone, I believe, will not have any exclusivity left. So you can expect to see more providers, like TalkTalk, becoming widely available. But others may need to do more work before they can launch in a specific area, since it’s a bit more involved than a checkbox kind of exercise.
Not in Norwich, and some other later CityFibre rollouts, it would seem?
https://www.cityfibre.com/news/air-broadband%E2%80%AFextends-gigabit-broadband-offering-across-10-cityfibre-locations/ (other providers are available!)