Frustration in Bournemouth and Poole Over CityFibre’s Delays
Residents in parts of the Bournemouth and Poole area on the South Coast of Dorset (England) have expressed frustration over ongoing delays in CityFibre’s local deployment of a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network, which was due to go live in some areas several months ago.
At present the operator is investing a total of £65m to deploy across the neighbouring towns and cities of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP). The work to upgrade and extend their legacy FTTH network in Bournemouth began all the way back in 2019, while the £30m build across Poole and Christchurch – supported by civil engineering firm CCN Communications – officially began in March 2021 (here).
A significant amount of this build has in fact been completed already – at least in Bournemouth – and some areas are live. But many others are suffering from an all too familiar problem, where the physical build was completed months ago and yet the network itself has yet to go live. As a result, CityFibre’s ISPs have made promises of service delivery that have not been met, which tends to cause frustration.
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For example, some consumers that planned to adopt CityFibre are currently spending more money on their existing ISP than they normally would because they’ve intentionally opted not to re-contract with their current provider or switch to another ISP on the same network platform (e.g. Openreach or Virgin Media). This is because they don’t want to be locked into a slower or more expensive plan if there’s a faster service coming.
The other problem is that neither CityFibre nor their ISPs seem able to give a clear indication of when issues like this will be resolved in each location. Some of these issues have recently been summed up by the Bournemouth Echo. But there may now be some good news on the way.
Kathryn Askew Smith, CF’s BCP Area Manager, said:
“Construction is now well underway on our full fibre rollout in Canford Heath, with the main civils works now nearing completion. As soon as this stage is reached, we will then test the network before making it ready for service, which we expect to happen well before the end of this year.
At that point, residents will have the option to connect their home to full fibre via a growing number of internet service providers and reap the benefits of a future-proof network and a faster and more reliable service.”
We should point out that this issue doesn’t just affect the Canford Heath area – it’s an issue across a big chunk of Poole, as well as other parts of the BCP area where the physical build has already completed. However, while CityFibre does tend to attract a lot of gripes like this from across the UK (these often reach our inbox and social feeds), the issue itself is by no means unique to them and other networks have attracted similar gripes.
We explored some of the reasons for this a few months back (Why Some UK Full Fibre Builds Take Longer to Go Live Than Others) and the core message from that is you should wait until the network itself is physically live for connections before making a decision to switch. Delays are not uncommon when building complex new full fibre networks, and significant delays do occur (we’ve seen waits of up to 1 year+ in some areas for various operators), so planning your ISP choice around this can be difficult.
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The BCP build forms part of CityFibre’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.
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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For my street it took 7 months to pretty much the day for my service to go live after they laid the cable in my street. On asking Zen they had 3 separate go live dates that each came and went. In the end after those 7 months it was only TalkTalk offering it to my street. Zen took quite literally 15 months after the cable was laid to go live in my street. I am pleased I therefore went with TalkTalk the second it went live. But 7 months is too long to go live after they’ve laid the cable. And it seems my street is not unique about this in Newcastle
Yes, I can sympathise… I got all excited after seeing the local roads dug up end of last year with a sign saying “sorry. Waffle waffle blah blah rabbit rabbit FIBRE TO THE HOME, blah blah drone drone”.
Signed up with LilaConnect February 2022, and as of today (15-sep-2022) still no amazing symmetrical optical goodness…
This is clearly karma biting me back for showing off and telling all my techie friends I’ll soon have 1Gbps symmetric.
Bournemouth is having same problems its been way too long after they put cable in and took out our power supply can you believe we had to have a generator for the whole night and over a year later no progress .
This is not just a city problem toob have been building in aldershot for nearly a year yet no start day beyond a joke at this point it’s the fact that nobody seems to know what’s going on frustrates people
This has become a standard problem for many now. From waiting for BDUK projects to the commercial ones taking longer.
Lapsing contracts is a hard decision for many especially given the current inflation issues. Worse still is the the need to re-contract for another 12/18/24 months
I see they still haven’t learnt the lessons from York then – areas here that were cabled several years ago and still not live – bet they don’t mention that when they go begging for investment…..
York was built by fibrenation, Talktalk and Sky.
Cityfibre bought fibrenation and had to change all of the network over to match cityfibre spec.
The government also made cityfibre change all Huawei kit out of the existing cabinets.
That’s strange I don’t know of any not spots in YO. Do you care to share whre I’m curious? It’s very obvious Talktalk have stopped offering but a few have popped up to fill the gap. IDNet yayzi Voda and pure off the top of my head
@Yorkiebar Huntington have a couple where they’ve cabled part of the area, never gone live and now they are cabling missed sections but these are 6 months & counting without being live also!
Same in South Leeds… They’ve been laying fibre since January and still nothing is live… Meantime, OR started in May and finished most it already.
Not sure what they’re rollout strategy is – but wouldn’t they have an interest to light up those fibres as soon as they are in the streets? Or are they only cashing in subsidies and don’t really care about the rest?
The core route goes in 1st in some places the core goes in a lot sooner than the network to the house.
Same in north leeds. Vodafone people were knocking on doors in January letting people know it was going live soon. Still nothing.
South Leeds they built a core network for mobile masts and other things and have since been doing second and in some cases third digs to get it to homes.
Shouldn’t be too much longer.
Yeah – that’s my impression, too. In some places they doubled some streets. Just don’t understand this “we wait until we can activate an entire part of town” strategy. Wouldn’t it be more lucrative for them to activate this street by street like Openreach? Or do they really only care about 5g masts and public sector buildings for their business?
Same in dewsbury, works started in 2019 apparently. Went past my steet in dec 2021. Still nothing…
Fibrediet – I’m in Upper Batley and got just as excited when they went down my street in March of this year.
They have brought the fibre to the Openreach pole outside my house but then nothing… can’t order …
They claim to be live down my street but getting them to actually run the fibre to my building is proving difficult. Vodafone are the ISP, city fibre failed to turn up the first time, the second time they arrived and said they can’t do anything as the fibre wasn’t to my building. I know that. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing surely? Apparently not. Ive got an alleged install date of upto the 16th, ie today. Let’s see what happens…
They need permission from the landlord / building managing agent and then will run a fibre installation to all units. They don’t install to MDUs / apartment buildings piecemeal, unit by unit.
I don’t think it would show as available if he’d live in an MDU
The use of ‘building’ implies an MDU. I can’t speak for everyone but I’ve never heard anyone refer to their house as their building.
There may be a screwy database involved. No idea why Vodafone keep accepting orders after the initial failure and CityFibre didn’t update availability.
Ridiculous waste of everyone’s time.
And to think, in less than 10 years they’ll all be gone and their networks will be in tatters and owned by Virgin. To quote a regular commentator on this site, ‘ it’s all part of the superfarce’ ( well, almost).
The build in Ipswich seems to be lucky mine they dug up and laid the cable and I was switched and live within 2 weeks
My road in the Oakdale area was completed in July last year, really hoping it’s done soon so I can halve my bill in comparison to Virgin.
Check the CityFibre website – seemed to go live with Oakdale orders over the weekend…
Seems things have moved on – I am in Oakdale, Poole with an install date booked with No One Internet of this Friday. Keeping fingers crossed that all goes to plan!