Community Fibre in Huge £985m Funding Boost for UK Fibre Rollout
London focused UK ISP CommunityFibre, which has so far covered 675,000 premises in the city and South East with their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, has this afternoon announced that they’ve signed a new finance facility of £985m that will enable the company to execute the next phase of their rollout.
At present the operator, which also owns ISP Box Broadband – a full fibre network covering parts of Surrey and West Sussex in England (here), is aiming to reach 2.2 million UK premises by 2024 – that’s more than half of all the homes in London (3.7 million). We should add that Box Broadband alone also holds a “goal of delivering fibre to in excess of 250,000 homes by the end of 2024.”
However, in order to achieve their targets, they’d still need more investment, which is where today’s new finance facility of £985m should come in handy. The funding is made up of £685m in committed facilities, with a further £300m uncommitted accordion. CommunityFibre were advised on the deal by Rothschild & Co.
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Graeme Oxby, CEO of Community Fibre, said:
“We are delighted that lenders have seen the impact of our ever increasing network and the level of customer interest in faster, more reliable and more affordable broadband access. In a time of money worries for many families, Community Fibre has been able to deliver a better service for a lower price. We will now be able to accelerate our network roll out and bring these benefits to a much larger number of customers.”
Customers typically pay from £20 per month on a 24-month term (£22 post-contract) for their unlimited 50Mbps (symmetric speed) package with free setup and a free router, which rises to £25 per month (£27 post-contract) for their top 920Mbps service. The operator also offers a super-cheap 10Mbps tier for just £12.50 per month, which is aimed at those who may struggle to afford the main plans.
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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Why not just add an extra bit for 1 billion
Is the definition of “delivered” premises passed or customers connected? at nearly £1bn that could be a lot of wasted money.
Delivered = passed
Having 2million homes connected would be an insane feat. They will be aiming for about 20-30% uptake I assume
Good question Dave. They passed by mine recently, had an offer for £25 for 1Gbps package… after a few weeks it went back to £40+. Renewed elsewhere (higher price) and now tied in 24 months. All ISP’s prices yo yo so much, would have been all over this, sadly I’m now in the ‘Premises passed’ category..at least for the next 20+ months or so.. 🙁
Industry standard is for the number to be the amount of premises able to order the service with no installation charges above whatever a standard setup fee (if any) would be.
It was badly worded rhetorical sarcasm. Sorry.
Lovely! Perhaps this will accelerate their coming to my area!
Any review about community fibre ?
I planned to move to CF.
Loads. Check out the forum. Many, many happy customers.
Got a business circuit with them for our office.
Install was a bit chaotic and a pain, but now it’s in the service is brilliant.
We should add that Box Broadband alone also holds a “goal of delivering fibre to in excess of 250,000 homes by the end of 2024.”
Looking at the speed at which the service is being rolled out by Box broadband, I doubt they will hit that figure by the end of 2024.
On a side note, BT has lots of road works being planned in the next few weeks in the same areas Box box has already rolled out their service.
Great!
Box Broadband’s TV offers over 200 channels of entertainment!
> 200+ live channels including Freeview, 50+ in HD!
> 40,000 hours of on-demand content
> Choice of add-ons (BT Sport, Rakuten TV, BritBox, hayu, and more…)
> Unlimited Tablet and Mobile TV
See: https://www.boxbroadband.co.uk/tv/
Is it better the Community Fibre TV offer?!
-TV & Streaming
Community Fibre TV with London’s fastest 100% full fibre broadband provide:
.215+ live channels
.40+ apps
.Premier Sports included (worth £12.99/month)
.100 extra Freeview channels
.Unlimited tablet and mobile TV
.60,000 hours on-demand
.Free 4K and & WiFi box, Alexa compatible TV box – worth £149
.Choice of add-ons (BT Sport, Rakuten TV, BritBox, Hauy and more)
.Record/pause live TV
See:
https://communityfibre.co.uk/tv
https://www.boxbroadband.co.uk/tv/