CityFibre Start FTTP Broadband Rollout in Village of Binley Woods

CityFibre has announced that they’ve begun to extend their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the large suburban village and civil parish of Binley Woods in Warwickshire, which is expected to cost somewhere around £500,000 – making it one of the operator’s smallest builds to date.

The operator has appointed civil engineering firm Callan to conduct the street works. Each area will usually take a few weeks to complete, however, construction teams will typically only be outside each home for 2 to 3 days and the overall project is expected to reach completion by late 2022. Binley Woods is said to be home to a population of around 2,700.

Naturally, the new build will support their wider £4.9bn project to cover up to 8 million premises – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). So far, the operator has already covered 1.7 million UK premises – with 1.5m ‘Ready For Service‘ via a supporting ISP (here).

Neal Wright, CityFibre’s Area Manager for Binley Woods, said:

“I’m immensely excited and proud to see work getting underway in Binley Woods. This is the start of an exciting new chapter for the town 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 official announcement describes Binley Woods as a town, although the Wikipedia entry uses the term “suburban village” and that seems fair, seeing as it’s on the outskirts of Coventry. At present the community does not appear to be covered by any gigabit-capable broadband networks, but Openreach do plan to cover it with FTTP across two separate rollout phases.