CityFibre UK’s Newcastle Full Fibre Build Tops 50,000 Premises
Fibre optic network builder Cityfibre has announced that their £50m project to deploy a new 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the northern city of Newcastle (Tyne and Wear), which first began at the end of 2019 (here), has now covered 50,000 premises in the city and rising.
Work has now been completed in the Kenton, Arthur’s Hill, West Denton, Scotswood, Benwell Grange, Walker, Walkergate, Holystone, St Anthony’s and Cowgate areas of the city. CityFibre’s rollout will now focus on the Fenham, Benton, South Heaton, Chapel House, Lemington, Chapel Park and Kingston Park areas throughout 2024. We assume this is still being supported by civil engineering firm IQA Elecnor, but it’s not stated.
The work supports CityFibre’s wider ambition 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 already passed over 3 million UK homes – Ready for Service (built footprint of 3.37m), but they’ll need to go a lot faster or acquire a rival or two in order to stand any chance of reaching their current ambition in time.
Paul Wakefield, CityFibre’s Senior Partnership Manager for Newcastle, said:
“We are delighted to have over 50,000 premises ‘Ready For Service’ in our Newcastle rollout, bringing the best digital connectivity available to the city. As we continue our build into even more areas of Newcastle, now is the time to check your postcode and find out if you can also benefit from improved gaming, working and streaming.”
The city also has significant gigabit-capable broadband coverage from both Virgin Media (VMO2 + nexfibre) and Openreach, while other alternative networks such as Grain and Hyperoptic can also be found in a number of areas. The original announcement noted that CityFibre’s own roll-out in the city was planned to complete by the end of 2024.
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 and Linkedin.
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Would be great if CF would restart work in Bath,& finally finish what they started…
Build in Bath has been scrapped
They might have passed 50,000 but they’ve still not activated the fibre outside my house that they laid in December 2021 and I am in Gosforth in Newcastle upon Tyne. Openreach laid FTTP in Feb 2022 and was active in the May of 2022. I took FTTP with Sky and I am now into my second contract term whilst they’re still sitting with dormant cables inside the openreach ducts
Done the same down my road, installed 5 cabinets a year ago!!
Nothing else happened since
Openreach went behind them and reinstated the foot boxes after they ruined them
It always amazes me that the altnets start works that they then walk away from for months and years on end. Swish dug our street up a year ago, laid a duct and cable and only came back this week and strung some cables between poles. Perhaps in another year they’ll come back and fit the DP’s. In the meantime Openreach has been live for 2 1/2 years and have now converted 43% of the street. I can’t think of any business that spends money then doesn’t try to start earning revenue from their investment ASAP.
Same story, green box at end of street, told they’d use PIA off the openreach poles to speed things up and tumbleweed ever since. Same groundhog day feeling as the cable installs in the 90s
Plenty of shouting about premises passed, not so much shouting about take-up rates, funny that isn’t it?!
There’s always a lag between being passed and actual take-up, primarily because people are already locked into their existing deals.
I think that the take-up figures are only really relevant for premises that were passed more than 2 years ago.
All surrounding streets here in Gosforth, Newcastle have active service. Waited over a year for a response to be told my street of 10 properties have been missed as they say it’s not economically viable to connect us to the next street less than 20 meters away.