CityFibre Begins Gigabit Broadband Rollout in Bognor Regis
CityFibre’s ongoing £195m investment in the rollout of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across East and West Sussex (England) has just added the seaside town of Bognor Regis to their active build phase, which will also include all the villages between Pagham and Elmer.
The operator is already building in a number of locations across the region, including Chichester, Adur & Worthing, Crawley, Horsham, Eastbourne and Brighton & Hove. A new project is also due to commence in the Littlehampton area “shortly“, thus Bognor is only the latest in a growing list of locations that have now entered the civil engineering phase.
The local civil engineering work is being undertaken by contractor CCN Communications, with the first work commencing in the North Bersted area. The entire area is currently due to be completed by the end of 2024 and each part of the town will become available gradually, although it usually takes a fair few months before the first homes can order a service.
Advertisement
As usual this build forms part of CityFibre’s £4bn investment programme, which has so far enabled their full fibre network to cover 1.5 million UK premises with 1.3m ‘Ready for Service’ by an ISP (here), and they currently aim to have 8 million premises “substantially completed” – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here).
Adrian Smith, CityFibre’s City Manager for Bognor Regis, said:
“I’m immensely excited and proud to see work getting underway in the town. This is the start of a new chapter for Bognor Regis as it gets ready to thrive in the digital age. 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.”
The town itself looks to be a fairly good target for CityFibre, not least because their only real gigabit-capable broadband rival in the area is currently Openreach (BT) and there should be enough premises to provide strong viability for the survival of both networks. We’re used to seeing three such operators playing in similar sized towns, so having only two is becoming somewhat of a rarity.
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.
« Hyperoptic CEO on Consolidation and Obstacles to Urban Full Fibre Builds
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (6114)
- BT (3676)
- Politics (2757)
- Business (2462)
- Openreach (2432)
- Building Digital UK (2354)
- Mobile Broadband (2182)
- FTTC (2092)
- Statistics (1937)
- 4G (1839)
- Virgin Media (1794)
- Ofcom Regulation (1605)
- Fibre Optic (1483)
- Wireless Internet (1473)
- 5G (1437)
I would be interested to know if there are Any CityFibre build plans due for locations West of Swansea, East of Carmarthen
https://cityfibre.com/
No, but http://www.ogi.wales are currently building in Pembrokeshire, Monmouthshire and Vale of Glamorgan, have opened warehouses in St Clears and Newport, an office in Tongwynlais and a new HQ in Cardiff.
They plan to build in Carmarthenshire and Swansea County.
Hopefully it will come up North!
Already up north, Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee…
I live in Bognor and I cannot tell you how happy I am to hear this!
Can you not access FTTP off Openreach?
Openreach in Bognor have only cabled drop poles with Fibre and left all the underground work for now. Goodbto hear an Altnet coming to Bognor at last.
@chris – not true, it may be an area of high direct in ground cables have been left off but this will be done at some point in the future
@Sussex Fibre – which is why I said “left all the underground work for now”. To be clear all the Openreach Fibre work to date in Bognor has mostly been on drop poles. Very little work has been done in any road which has ducts or directly burred cables.
I am sure these will be done at some point but Openreach have only done the easy cheap bits ‘for now’.
I would not get too excited , we are still waiting to be connected 8 weeks on after having vodaphone installed via city fibre ,wish we had not bothered and are thinking of leaving before we even start ,
This is fantastic news
With TalkTalk in Bognor Regis (Bersted area) have had no internet for three days straight.
Had email from City Fibre with apologies for minor disruption. Three whole days (so far) is not a minor disruption!
Worse still TalkTalk say theres no problem all working normally