CityFibre to Harness Shared Digital Infrastructure for FTTP in Blackpool

CityFibre aim to boost their £60m rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the Lancashire seaside town of Blackpool by joining the Cooperative Network Infrastructure (CNI) scheme, which enables commercial re-use of existing local authority owned cable ducts and fibre.

The operator’s work in Blackpool, supported by Telent, began during the spring of 2021 (here) in the Moor Park area of Bispham and the entire project is expected to be finished by the end of 2024. By harnessing the CNI, CityFibre, along with existing operators like Virgin Media, will also gain wholesale access to fibre and exchange point facilities to help support their build.

As the CNI website explains: “Tameside, Blackpool [, Manchester, Sussex] and their public sector partners invest in new infrastructure assets where a business case can be made to meet needs. Then those assets are sewn together to form a coherent, integrated infrastructure that can be shared using a co-operative. In general, the business case for each investment stands alone. By linking assets together into a shared network, the business case is multiplied.”

Steve Thorpe, Local City Manager at CityFibre, said:

“With our teams already starting to build the network in the borough, collaboration and coordination with local partners is imperative. Membership of the CNI is a critical and positive step forward and we’re looking forward to the new opportunities that this will bring.”

All of the above should aid CityFibre’s wider £4bn investment programme, which has already covered 1 million UK premises with FTTP and aims to have 8 million “substantially completed” – across 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). This will also cover a total of around 800,000 businesses, 400,000 public sector sites and 250,000 5G access points.