CityFibre Refreshes Brand – Brings Full Fibre to 1.9 Million UK Homes
Major alternative network provider CityFibre, which is currently investing over £5bn (debt and equity) to make their full fibre (FTTP) based gigabit broadband ISP network available to almost 8 million premises (c.30% of the UK) by the end of 2025 (here), has today announced a “major brand update” (i.e. they have a new logo).
Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not much of a marketing man, in fact there are few things I loathe more than bland sales pitches – where X company rep spends valuable minutes of your time verbally insulting your intelligence with reams of hyperbole and sound bites, before eventually – hopefully – getting to some sort of constructive point. Ideally before you’ve topped yourself from sheer boredom.
Suffice to say, the perceived benefits from a lot of brand refreshes are often lost on me, particularly when the previous brand identity was already strong and in need of no improvement – much as in CityFibre’s case. We liked the clean green text they had before, and their name was recognisable.
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Not that the new branding is bad, but it does slightly echo Hyperoptic’s approach and the colours can be a little garish in places (the hardly readable orange and pink one below could be considered a crime against humanity), although they seem to use different colour schemes for the logo in other areas (e.g. soft blue on white), which works better. But we’re simply not convinced that such efforts are always necessary or desirable.
However, none of this should distract from the exceptional work that CityFibre are doing to take on the big boys. At the previous update in June 2022, the operator claimed to have already covered 1.7 million UK premises – with 1.5m ‘Ready For Service‘ via 30 supporting ISPs, such as Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), TalkTalk (Future Fibre), Zen Internet, Giganet and others. By comparison, today’s announcement puts the figure at 1.9 million passed homes (or 1.7 million RFS)
One other interesting point in today’s announcement is the confirmation that one of CityFibre’s first city builds in Milton Keynes is now exceeding 20% take-up, which is a positive sign.
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Dan Ramsay, Chief Marketing Officer at CityFibre, said:
“Thanks to years of forced-reliance on outdated copper and cable networks, people across the country are underwhelmed, confused and mistrustful of the broadband industry. Given its importance to every aspect of our lives, we don’t believe that’s acceptable.
That’s why we’re excited to unveil our new brand identity. It’s bold and straight-talking, designed to cut through, engage and inform people that the best way to improve their experience, is to change their network.
As the UK’s undisputed full fibre challenger, we’re showing millions of people across the country how connecting to a CityFibre network can transform their experience of living and working online.”
The operator hopes that today’s brand refresh will “help cement CityFibre’s position as the UK’s second-largest full fibre network” and indeed their “awareness activities and partner marketing support are now reaching over 2.5 million homes and businesses a month” (i.e. direct mails, letter drops, digital advertising and email marketing to drive awareness of their network deployments).
The announcement also correctly highlights that “consumer confusion is endemic in the broadband market, with 64% of consumers unaware of the difference between full fibre and part fibre broadband“. The updated brand’s assets have thus been designed to help “cut through this confusion, explaining the superior user-experience when connected to CityFibre’s network“, although they don’t elaborate on this and didn’t strictly need a brand refresh to do that.
UPDATE 11:10am
CityFibre has confirmed that the numbers are more than 1.9m passed and 1.7m RFS via an ISP.
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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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Also a new ISP has been launched in my area called octaplus (octaplus.co.uk) never heard of it before and it wasn’t there a month ago. 100Mbps is £25, 300 is £35, 500 is £40, 700 is £45, and 900 is £50. It’s all on a 12 month contract and they offer a TV service which looks like it’s based on Netgem.
Now if they could just finish actually connecting properties in existing rollouts (finally have a toby box outside and there is fibre laid but apparently not connected yet….) after years of chasing to resolve black spots, instead of messing about with grand claims of new towns/cities and rebrands – I think they are trying to compete with Openreach on being the most inefficient and useless
The hole in the logo represents the streets they deliberately choose to omit in every postcode area.
Very good Jerry. I liked that.
The green on blue fails all Web Content Accessibility Guidelines so they clearly don’t care about being inclusive for people with visual impairments. I haven’t checked the other colour combinations but suspect they didn’t either. https://colourcontrast.cc/01b9dd/00f96b
All of them apart from blue on white are pretty bad colour combinations. Not sure why they don’t go with purple or green which they are already associated with.
But they don’t appear to be using those low accessibility variants on their website?
The colour scheme seems to come from a 5 year old child’s choices or mr. tumbles clown costume… it doesn’t look serious, its probably the staff sitting in the office making daft decisions just to justify their pay/job. There should be more adults up top making final decession on such things after careful consideration and not the disabled person somewhere in the office or are there children as boss at this company?
The logo is a pacman with an eye instead of a mouth
“Passed without service” is meaningless and just serves to trick their own investors
Logo looks like one of the old stereo volume dials to me 🙂 Something you’d get on a philips in the 90s
Looks like a Death Star to me!
Yeah that 2nd biggest Full Fibre operator title is not going last too long once Virgin kick there FTTP switchover into full force. CityFibre will need a lot more investment to get anywhere near Virgin after that is complete.
What switchover? They can’t just magically change all there old coaxial cables into fibre + virgin are super unreliable if you do anything more than just browse the web.
I know probably a good 100 people from the gaming community i am in have left virgin 1gb to go to BT FTTC because its more reliable and lower ping.
Now we have actual proper fibre connections available the advertising standards agency needs to clamp down on all the false “fibre broadband” advertising.
It’s surprising how many people you talk to about fibre being rolled out just to be told ” I’ve had fibre broadband for years”.
CityFibre seem to be using “RFS” where Openreach use “passed”, and CityFibre’s definition of “passed” doesn’t seem to have a parallel.
The only relevant figure is who is either already connected, or who can order a service and have it connected without ECCs. A spine going down a main road doesn’t count as anything.
Cityfibre RFS is any homes that are ready for the ISP to sell to customers.
Homes passed is anything that’s built and complete but not ready for sale just yet.
If it is complete then service can be ordered. If service can’t be ordered then the correct term for it is fudge
Well, that van livery is a look.
Makes me think of traditional rhubarb and custard sweets which I don’t think is the intention.
I wonder how much money they spent on the ‘design’ of their new logo.
They BT’d their logo. A.k.a. making it uglier than before.
Six months after their build on my street in Newcastle using existing openreach ducts, it still says there’s a problem connecting me or any nearby postcodes. Openreach came and put their own FTTP in last December and it was active in February I got 500mb Sky Fibre in April
Cityfibre came in February ….. still nothing and my friend’s street took 12 months from build to connect, 1 mile away
Wow, just wow.
They have dig and relayed fibre 4x in the same 500yds spot within the last 10months
Must be costing a fortune
only 1.9million hahah
“Ideally before you’ve topped yourself from sheer boredom.”
Ballsy, absolutely Ballsy. Well done, Mark. My compliments haha!
Seems like a pointless exercise, there was nothing wrong with the logo before. What matters the most is that they roll out as efficiently as possible and run a cost effective reliable services without missing areas out in their catchment area.
At first sight, the logo reminded me of the cable TV equipment provider Cabletime (anyone remember them) and then the colour scheme got me thinking about Hyperoptic!