CityFibre Extend FTTP Broadband Cover in Peterborough Again

CityFibre UK and their local civil engineering partner, Granemore Group, have today announced a second expansion of their original £30m rollout in the Cambridgeshire city of Peterborough, which has already put their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network within reach of 60,000 premises.

The original full fibre deployment in the city started all the way back in July 2018 and the first customers then went live, via Vodafone’s associated Gigafast Broadband packages, during February 2019 (here); they were later followed by TalkTalk’s related Future Fibre packages. Earlier this year (here) the project was given an additional £1.5m boost to help cover a number of new areas, including the villages of Glinton and Eye.

By comparison, today’s second extension deal is said to be worth £3m (total project funding now c.£35m) and will see the operator’s network reach “thousands more homes and businesses“. The build phase of this work is currently already underway in the Hampton and Stanground areas. Otherwise, “homes across most of Peterborough” are now said to be ready for service.

Rebecca Stephens, CityFibre’s City Manager for Peterborough, said:

“This is great news for the city. We’ve been working to bring our best-in-class full fibre network to thousands of homes in the city for the last few years and there’s a clear demand – you only have to look at what we’ve been through in the last 18 months of the pandemic to see how much we rely on good broadband connectivity for homeworking and schooling, telehealth, and business innovation.

This extra investment means we can keep going to ensure even more premises can access the network. Peterborough is a trailblazer, becoming one of the first cities in the UK to have this level of digital infrastructure, creating opportunities and giving a digital boost to the local economy for years to come.”

The expansion supports CityFibre’s wider £4bn deployment project, which aims to cover 1 million UK premises with their gigabit-capable FTTP network by the end of 2021 (they look likely to achieve this) and then 8 million are expected to be “substantially completed” across 285 cities, towns and villages – c.30% of the UK – by the end of 2025 (here). This will also cover around 800,000 businesses, 400,000 public sector sites and 250,000 5G access points.