CityFibre UK Starts £17m Loughborough FTTP Broadband Rollout
CityFibre has announced that they’ve started the construction phase of their £17 million project to rollout a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to cover “almost every home and business” in the Leicestershire (England) market town of Loughborough.
The first street works, which are being conducted by civil engineering contractor Granemore Group, are occurring in the Storer and Garendon areas of town. If all goes to plan, then the operator hopes to have completed their build “early in 2024“.
CityFibre main gigabit-capable competition in the town will come from Virgin Media, while Openreach have only done a little FTTP.
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CF Area Manager, James Cushing, said:
“I’m thrilled to see work getting underway on our full fibre network in the town. The data age is here, and fast and reliable connectivity has never been more important. With this new digital infrastructure upgrade, Loughborough will have the digital foundations it needs to thrive today, and long into the future.”
The work forms part of CityFibre’s wider effort to cover up to 8 million UK premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). The operator has so far covered a total of 2.5 million premises (passing 22,000 premises per week), but only 2.2 million of those are currently considered to be ‘Ready for Service‘ by an 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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Always sounds very impressive reading press releases of hundreds of thousands or millions of premises passed, however I’d be far more impressed if Cityfibre started telling us their percentage take-up rate on their existing builds.
As we’re all aware, the FTTP market is getting pretty saturated, lots of over building, huge investments, huge debts, interest rates rising, investors getting nervous, build costs increasing, redundancies, etc.
Anyone from Cityfibre on here that could tell us about their target and actual percentage take-up so far?
Or is that just a taboo subject nobody wants to talk about?
Why would they shareA a fairly sensitive part of their business plan with some random on ISPR?
CityFibre has, to be fair, released some limited data on take-up. The following report from Numis also touched on it, which CityFibre had some input into.
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/11/numis-report-on-cityfibre-reveals-new-details-of-uk-fttp-broadband-build.html
Customer penetration across CF’s RFS footprint – where ISPs now allow you to take the service – is climbing at a rate of c.1% a month. In some cities where CF networks are complete, customer take-up is already said to be >20% (e.g. Milton Keynes) and rising monthly.
There’s also this official data:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/01/cityfibre-expands-full-fibre-broadband-to-2-5-million-uk-premises.html
Its been on going for several weeks in the town now, hopefully they expand to other area like Shepshed and Hathern as per their press release a few years ago.