Business ISP Spitfire Extend UK Wholesale Partnership with CityFibre
Business communications and broadband ISP Spitfire has today announced an extension of their existing partnership with UK network operator CityFibre, which will enable them to sell the operator’s layer 2 business Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband product to customers.
CityFibre’s full fibre broadband network currently covers 3 million UK premises (up from 2.5m in January 2023) and 2.6 million of those are considered to be ‘Ready For Service’ by a supporting broadband ISP (up from 2.2m). But the operator’s ambition is to cover up to 8 million 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).
Meanwhile, Spitfire plans to launch its new full fibre services in late November 2023, initially offering a 160Mbps and 1Gbps service to business customers. In time, Spitfire expects to offer a range of faster speeds of up to 10Gbps, harnessing CityFibre’s upgrade of its network to XGS-PON technology.
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Spitfire’s wholesale partnership with CityFibre has been extended after a successful period since 2021 in which it has sold CityFibre’s dedicated fibre Ethernet and 200Mbps Ethernet Flex products, which are available in 28 cities across the UK.
Harry Bowlby, MD of Spitfire Network Services, said:
“We’re very pleased to be announcing an extension to our existing wholesale partnership with CityFibre – a partnership that has been hugely beneficial to both sides. With this announcement, Spitfire has strengthened its position as one of the leading internet and telecoms service providers in the UK. What matters to us is delivering the best products and services to our customers that suits the requirements of their businesses, and by adding CityFibre’s FTTP solution we are continuing to expand the offering for our customers.”
The deal also means that Spitfire is now able to offer its ‘One Network’ solution with full fibre broadband from 5 different wholesale network providers, and already offers dedicated fibre Ethernet from 8 different providers.
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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Cityfibre seem to have gone very quiet, no announcements recently.
Are they still building?
CityFibre are still quite active in a fair few locations, but as previously reported, they sent a good number of other places into limbo after ending some of their existing contractor agreements to build. The last I heard, they were still working on finding replacements for those contracts, which could take months and a lot can happen in that space of time.
My guess is Cityfibre needed to slow up build rate due to financial difficulties.
So they blamed quality issues with their contractors as an excuse for dumping them and putting builds on hold, rather than admitting they’re struggling to achieve decent take-up rates.
8 million premises by the end of 2025 seems somewhat fanciful now, seeing at last reported they had passed 2.9m (2.5m RFS) with a slowing build rate. They only way I can see that happening is via mergers with other altnets.
Cityfibre have spent a lot of investor’s money, I mean a huge amount, around 2 billion pounds.
Yes, they’ve passed many premises. But passing premises is one thing, getting people to sign up and start paying money to you is another thing.
Cityfibre’s marketing and sales departments are under huge pressure to make it work, but unfortunately it’s not happening quickly enough.
Investors aren’t going to keep pouring money in until they start seeing results.
Things are getting extremely tough.
Cityfibres support to its isps is terrible. Mine have told me they can’t raise any issues with CF after 1700 (I have been offline 48 hours now).
Would not trust them for a business service.
Yes, if you view Cityfibre’s Facebook page it’s just a list of complaints regarding terrible customer service, all they do is shirk responsibility for any problems and direct complaints to the ISP’s.
It’s a real shame.
And no statement from Cityfibre…
Very strange.