CityFibre Finally Begins £21m Full Fibre Rollout for Hartlepool

CityFibre has announced that they’ve finally started the £21m rollout of their new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the large port town of Hartlepool in County Durham, which was originally due to get underway in “early 2022” (here), but that seems to have been delayed a bit – until now.

The operator has picked civil engineering contractor Granemore Group to carry out the deployment, which is a company they’ve also used in other locations (Northampton, Peterborough etc.). The overall project is expected to reach completion by 2025, but the first areas should start to go live long before that date.

The latest build forms part of the operator’s wider £4.9bn investment programme 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, CityFibre has already covered 1.9 million UK premises – with 1.7m ‘Ready For Service‘ via a supporting ISP.

As usual, CityFibre won’t be the only gigabit-capable broadband network to play in these waters. Virgin Media’s network is already widely available across the location and Openreach also have a growing amount of FTTP infrastructure. In addition, both OFNL and Hyperoptic have a small presence and Grain has named the town on their plan too (here).