CityFibre FTTP Broadband Finally Goes Live in Gloucester UK

After a long wait, CityFibre has announced that their £31m project to deploy a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network across the city of Gloucester (Gloucestershire, England) has finally started to go live and connect the first local homes and businesses.

The Gloucester build, which is supported by the Kier Group, started a year ago and the physical build has long since completed in big parts of the city. The good news today is that properties in Quedgeley have become the first to go live on the new network, with parts of Podsmead, Tuffley and Hardwicke also becoming available.

Recently, more and more people have begun to notice the significant differences in how long it takes some new FTTP networks to go live. CityFibre in particular tend to like covering quite a wide area before they flick the on-switch, while others may start going live only a few weeks after the first build has begun. In this case, it took a full year before today’s announcement dropped, but better late than never.

Local residents can now take advantage of full fibre service through a number of supporting ISPs, including Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), TalkTalk (Future Fibre), Fibrehop, Air Broadband, Zen Internet and Giganet. More will no doubt join this list in the future.

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

“We are really pleased to be offering people in Gloucester all the benefits Full Fibre connectivity has to offer, and we would like to thank the residents in the area who have been extremely patient with us as we have built our infrastructure. We now look forward to expanding our horizons and offering more people in the area the opportunity to connect to our network, unlocking unbeatable homeworking, home learning and digital entertainment experiences.”

The city’s build is currently expected to be “substantially completed in Gloucester by 2024,” although it’s not known exactly how many premises in Gloucester they’ve now covered or how many they will have reached upon completion, only that the aim remains to service “almost every home and business.” In the past we’ve been told that “almost” may translate to 85%+ coverage, but we suspect this could vary between locations.

As usual the rollout forms part of 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.

As for the gigabit-capable competition in Gloucester, Cityfibre’s key competitors are Virgin Media, Openreach and, to a lesser extent, Glide and OFNL.