CityFibre Get GBP300m Boost for UK FTTP Broadband Rollout UPDATE

CityFibre has announced another big £300m investment boost to help support the expansion of their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network. The new funding has come from the Abu Dhabi government’s Mubadala investment fund, which has already put £500m into the operator.

At present the operator’s £4bn investment programme has already enabled their “full fibre” network to cover 1 million UK premises in predominantly urban cities and towns. After that they’re aiming to have 8 million premises “substantially completed” – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here).

All of this is being supported by major investments from several key funds, including the West Street Infrastructure Fund (Goldman Sachs), the Antin Infrastructure Fund, Interogo Holdings and Mubadala. The latter two are recent additions, after they both took a combined stake in the business worth £825m last September 2021 (here) – £500m of that came from Mubadala alone.

In addition, CityFibre also have an ambition to compete for rural deployment contracts under the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which is an area they’ve already trialled (here). In theory, the operator could use this to expand their coverage ambitions to reach an additional 1-2 million premises (beyond the existing target), but it remains to be seen how successful they are as other major players will also be bidding (BT, VMO2 etc.).

However, all of this requires money and, luckily, CityFibre has so far proven to be quite adept at attracting the necessary investment. Indeed, one existing investor, Mubadala, is so confident in the operator’s progress that they have invested another £300m. On top of that, we’re also expecting a separate deal to help the operator refinance its debt.

Combined, the recent investments now bring the total raised by CityFibre in the last six months alone to £1.425bn, which is one of the largest ever financing deals for UK Full Fibre deployment.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“Mubadala’s confidence in our business is testament to our growing momentum and progress. The need and appetite for carrier-neutral wholesale network competition at scale is clear, and CityFibre continues to demonstrate the benefits as a driver of wider investment, improved services and better value. With Mubadala’s continued support, we are well funded to deliver the UK’s finest Full Fibre network and help to level-up the UK.”

Admittedly, it will still take several years for CF to truly build itself into being the country’s third major infrastructure competitor after Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media (VMO2), both of which have major FTTP expansion and upgrade plans of their own. For example, Openreach aim to cover 25 million UK premises by December 2026 and VMO2 could potentially reach just a little shy of that by around 2027/28 (here).

We should point out that there are a lot of other significant alternative network (AltNet) providers in the UK market and some of them are already building at scale, such as Hyperoptic, CommunityFibre, G.Network, Gigaclear, KCOM and others (Summary of UK FTTP Build Progress).

In the future, we expect to see a fair bit of market consolidation, since dense urban areas would struggle to support more than 3-4 fixed gigabit-capable operators overbuilding each other and that model becomes even more strained in smaller towns.

UPDATE 7:02am

The official press release came out this morning, so we’ve updated the article to reflect that and add a comment.