After Long Delay – CityFibre Starts FTTP Build in Great Yarmouth

CityFibre has announced that they’ve finally started the construction phase of their £15m project to rollout a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to reach across “nearly every” home and business in the Norfolk seaside town of Great Yarmouth, which was originally due to begin last winter.

The first street works, which are being conducted by civil engineering contractor Pod-Trak, are occurring in the Southtown and Cobham areas of town. At the time of writing, it’s not clear why it’s taken so long to begin the build, after it was supposed to start last winter (here), although it may have been impacted by CityFibre’s job cuts and restructuring work (here).

The project 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 2.6 million premises, but only 2.3 million of those are currently considered to be ‘Ready for Service‘ by an ISP.

Charles Kitchin, CityFibre’s Area Manager for Great Yarmouth, said:

“It’s an exciting time for Great Yarmouth as the installation of our full fibre network gets underway. This upgraded infrastructure will allow homes and businesses across the town to thrive in the digital age by providing access to lightning-fast and reliable internet services.

It’s important to remember that any short-term disruption will pay off tremendously in the long-term as once the network is built, it will serve the community’s connectivity needs for decades to come.”

However, CityFibre won’t be the only gigabit-capable broadband operator in town, with Virgin Media already holding wide coverage over the area and Openreach being in the process of expanding their existing FTTP deployments.