CityFibre Confirm GBP27m Gigabit Broadband Build in Wakefield
CityFibre has today confirmed that they’re investing £27m to deploy their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to homes and businesses in the West Yorkshire (England) city of Wakefield, which is a location that was quietly removed from their rollout plan back in 2020.
Construction of the new full fibre network has already begun in the Lupset area and is being delivered by O’Connor Utilities (OCU). The overall project is expected to reach completion by 2024, although the first homes will start to go live well before then.
The rollout forms part of CityFibre’s wider £4bn investment programme, which has already covered 1 million UK premises 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.
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None of this will come as much of a surprise to our regular readers, since we first reported on the operator’s U-turn last month (here). We say U-turn because Wakefield was included on CityFibre’s original rollout plan in 2018, but in 2020 it vanished and didn’t reappear until now. Sadly, this unusual period of absence is not addressed in the accompanying comments.
Steve Moore, CF’s City Manager, said:
“I’m immensely excited and proud to see work getting underway in Wakefield today. We’re already making tremendous progress across Yorkshire and this is the start of an exciting new chapter for the city and its digital ambitions. It’s important to remember that any short-term disruption will pay off tremendously in the long-term – once the network’s built, it will serve the community’s connectivity needs for decades to come.”
It’s worth pointing out that Wakefield is fast becoming quite an aggressively competitive market for gigabit-capable broadband networks. For example, Virgin Media has already covered most of the city with their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network, while Openreach are busy expanding their FTTP availability and Netomnia (YouFibre) plan to do the same.
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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Ah good old Cityfibber promising yet more new areas before anywhere else is complete.
How would they get to their build target if they waited to finish one city prior to starting the next?
And how is it any different to any other provider out there?
@Alan. CityFibre don’t sell to individuals, like Openreach they wholesale services to ISPs at mainly at Layer 2. Never seen the T&Cs you mention in any ISPs that use them and how would CityFibre know about files you’ve downloaded when they are just shipping Ethernet Frames?
Have you mixed them up with someone else?
That’s strange Alan because I’m with Vodafone on Cityfibre and those t&c’s don’t exist in my Vodafone contract.
I’ve never agreed to any Cityfibre terms and conditions as I’m not a Cityfibre customer.
I don’t think anyone on Cityfibres FTTP network can actually buy direct from them so where are you finding these terms and conditions?
O’Connor are building in Leeds on an ongoing basis, and started Wakefield yesterday. The local authority is anchor tenant behind the build.
Not aware of any other city projects that might be taking resources that are being deployed in Wakefield. CityFibre have a contract with Wakefield Council and are delivering on it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not good news parts of London like me still have no FTTP only FTTC if its available as its shared connection if cabinet full I can only get ADSL connection.
Few blocks next to me are fibre enabled cause they are under local council Im with housing association which take longer sometimes it all depends on the circumstance.
News like this every week boils me not fair. Looks like the government will miss 2030 target to get everyone on gigabyte speeds at this rate.
See if you can get involved with your housing association to try and speed up FTTP. Openreach have a form here (https://openreach.com/fibre-broadband/fibre-for-home/fibre-for-apartment-buildings) for the housing association/landlord to apply to. Openreach will respond within a few days. Given that there is FTTP in the blocks next to you Openreach might fully fund the install.
Community Fibre or Hyperoptic can serve your building if your landlord signs with them. Don’t go for Openreach which is more expensive and less reliable
It was only till like last month that Wakefield had all of these announcements so don’t be too discouraged.
Anyone know where you can find cityfibres build starts?
My town Luton was announced, my contract is up and price hiking, don’t want to committ to 24 months if it’s likely to be next 12ish months.
Living in South Leeds and I was super happy when I saw some people working for cityfibre pulling some fibre through some of the existing ducting this week… The guy working there said my area should be done in 2 months… I wonder if they can just blow the fibre through my ducting towards the house or if they need to open the road (block paving) to install the Toby boxes etc… Who cares .. I just want more than my 60mbps fttc and virgin left out my street :/
They’ll use the existing duct. They only install Toby boxes when doing their own digging.
Good to know – thanks man