CityFibre UK to Begin £17m Loughborough FTTP Broadband Rollout
Cityfibre has today revealed that they’ll invest £17 million over the next few years to ensure that “almost every home and business” in the Leicestershire (England) market town of Loughborough is covered by their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network.
Construction work on the full fibre network is due to start in the Storer area, although the operator’s announcement doesn’t say precisely when this is due to begin and nor have they named a contractor for the build. But the good news, at least for Cityfibre, is that their only real gigabit-capable competition in the town will be from Virgin Media. By comparison, Openreach have done a little FTTP, but their plan seems to be ignoring most of the town.
The new build will form part of Cityfibre’s wider £5bn+ 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 2 million UK premises – with 1.8m Ready For Service (RFS) via a supporting ISP (here). The network will also pass around 800k businesses, 400k local authority sites and 250k 5G access points.
CF Area Manager, James Cushing, said:
“We’re excited to get to work on Loughborough’s town-wide full fibre network, which will transform the town’s digital capabilities for decades to come. From smooth streaming when watching movies at home to buffer-free calls at the office, we cannot wait for residents and businesses to reap the many benefits of full fibre technology.”
End.
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 and Linkedin.
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At last, Leicestershire gets some love. I have clients reluctantly on leased lines that will be very happy to hear this.
Until it starts to slow down – if they have any sense they will see what it’s like at the end of their term. And I say this as a person who is reluctantly on leased line. I am not sure I would have CF as a backup let alone a replacement right now
Definitely.
Great opportunity to either entirely eliminate the leased line and replace with two diverse broadband services or to downgrade it heavily and have bulk traffic across broadband and the line as backup and for mission critical applications very sensitive to latency, loss, jitter and contention.
Looking forward to moving my own backup service to CF so that I get some resiliency against JCBs – at the moment both my FTTP services are in the same ducts all the way to the exchange.
I bet VM will be crying, another ALTNET eating away.
Cityfibre aren’t really an altnet anymore and VM expect to lose business to them. Openreach do too. Plenty of business in urban areas for the 3 big players + a genuine altnet to swim in the same waters.
Cityfibre seem to take ages to go live I have found
CF did loads of work locally, still not ready, tubes still loose round BT poles.
They are building an exchange up the road though!
Cityfibre cabled my street in January in Newcastle upon Tyne
The fibre is still not live
Openreach upgraded us to FTTP in February 2022 and it was live in April and I was connected in May when my Sky Broadband was due for renewal
Cityfibre cabled my friends street in June 2021 and it only went active in July 2022 ……. he got so fed up waiting that he went to Virgin, who cabled in December 2021 and it was active 6 weeks later
Having just seen CF contractors do a 30M section of both sides of a street and a diagonal cut across in 6. hours I am not sure they do a proper job either.
Sounds about right for narrow trenching with some time to spare to cross a road. Only needs to go to 250 mm clearance in pavement and 400 mm in carriageway.
If it’s been done wrong it’ll need fixing. May also have temporary reinstatement and they’ll be back to make it permanent. Might have needed it done before schools go back.
Giganet just sent me an e-mail saying I can pre order their service in September 2023.. CF are currently doing nearby streets – so yes about a year assuming that’s right.
@XGS yes i didn’t think about that – I don’t have any kids so never considered that – It is right outside the school with the majority of the kit on the zigzags
CityFibre completed work in my area in June this year, and according to Giganet’s website their services are going live and ready for installs in early November.
A lot of people that are saying they are seeing their street cabled up and a long turn around time.
Most of the time, this is either core network cables going in as Cityfibre install there own they don’t use PIA for the core or advanced subducting in PIA.
The build complete to ready for sale in normally about 3-4 months
Definitely seen cases where the core was built in 2020 and they’re only just building out distribution cabinets.
In my own city this is not the case. They are building it all in one hit with cabinets, core drill to Openreach chambers, trenches and CBTs on poles going in as they build the core.
Cabinets are a pretty easy way to tell the build phase. If they’re going in it’s the phase of the build to connect homes. No cabinets it’s multiple phases and that dig isn’t for homes.
My town has been a complete mess as far as the cityfibre rollout goes, started in 2020 and is still ongoing, with large parts of the town still not connected, granted Covid caused a bit of a delay, as did one of the contractors going bust, but it’s really spotty and slow. CityFibre are of zero use – they simply don’t respond to any method of contact.
I live near Loughborough (about 7 miles away in a small village). Our fibre is poor (30Mb). Given that CityFibre have now committed to rollout in the town, is that potentially a way in for a bunch of residents of the surrounding villages contacting them and saying “given that you’re already doing the work in Loughborough, maybe you’d consider going further and bringing some of that sweet, sweet FTTP to us rural folk?”