CityFibre Begins Maidstone’s £50m Gigabit Broadband Rollout
Cityfibre has today confirmed that they’ve begun the construction phase of their £50m project – supported by civil engineering firm Lanes-i – to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to “almost every home and business” in the Kent (England) town of Maidstone.
So far as we can tell, most of the operator’s initial build will be focused upon the Allington area of Kent, but they’ll face plenty of competition from gigabit-capable rivals. Virgin Media already has strong coverage of the town, while both Openreach and Netomnia (YouFibre) are also deploying their own full fibre in the same location. Some limited coverage also exists from Hyperoptic and OFNL, while Trooli has a nearby rollout in Loose.
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).
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Anne Krausse, CityFibre’s Area Manager for Maidstone, said:
“I’m incredibly proud to see our team start work on Maidstone’s full fibre network today. As we roll out our infrastructure across the town, it’s important to remember that any short-term disruption will pay off tremendously in the long-term. Our network will help ensure that Maidstone is ready to thrive in the digital age by giving almost every home and business in the town access to the best available digital connectivity.”
Assuming no delays, the rollout is currently expected to reach completion by 2027.
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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Too much money to burn. How much take up can they get being the 5th gig enabled network in a small town
I’m in Maidstone and don’t have any 1gig provider yet!
CityFibre are starting with my area in the north west of the town. Just hope I don’t have to wait anywhere near 2027 to get connected by them or anyone else.
I think nearly half of Maidstone doesn’t yet have fibre, see e.g. https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/index.php?tab=2&election=1#13/51.2478/0.5620/allfttp/
I’ll be interested to see how Cityfibre are looking to satisfy their investors with only 6% takeup on their network
The take up number isn’t published. It’s actually much higher.
I thought Netomnia were building there?
They are, according to TBB they’ve already covered a good chunk of the southeast area. At this rate they might cover half the town in a few months
They are here as well. I have Openreach and Netomnia building near me at the moment, and CityFibre start next week.
Netomnia seem to be doing work relating to connecting different parts to the existing network in the main town, no service is available yet in my area.
Do they have to be visible in each street doing work and outside each address to get some idea when it will go live for people?
@Matt: Try https://one.network/, choose ‘next 3 months’, to see where the telecoms are doing road works for fibre deployment.