Cityfibre’s £30m Build to Cover Wigan with Gigabit Broadband Begins

Cityfibre has announced that they’ve begun construction work on their £30m project to cover the large Greater Manchester (England) town of Wigan with their new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband ISP network, which aims to “reach … almost every home and business“.

Construction work on the new full fibre network in Wigan is being undertaken by civil engineering contractor O’Connor Utilities Ltd (OCU), although it remains unclear precisely how many premises will benefit or when the local rollout is planned to complete. But the first services will start to go live in the “months to come“.

The build forms part of Cityfibre’s wider effort to cover up to 8 million premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – 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, including 1.8m Ready For Service (RFS) via ISPs (here).

The UK network will also pass around 800,000 businesses, 400,000 local authority sites and 250,000 5G access points.

Julie Derbyshire, CityFibre’s Area Manager for Wigan, said:

“I’m immensely excited and proud to see work getting underway in town today. This is the start of an exciting new chapter for Wigan 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.”

As usual, Cityfibre will face some competition from gigabit-capable rivals in the town, with Virgin Media (VMO2) already covering most of the area. Openreach also has some FTTP coverage in the town, but it’s currently still quite patchy. In addition, Grain announced their plan to build in Wigan at the start of this year (here), but there’s a question mark over how much progress they’ve made since then (nothing seems to be live yet).