CityFibre Moves FTTP Broadband Rollout in Lincoln to New Areas

CityFibre has today provided a progress update on their £21m project to roll-out a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the Lincolnshire (England) city of Lincoln, which began in March 2022 (here) and has now largely completed its build across the wards of Abbey, Glebe, Minster, Castle, Carholme and Birchwood.

The deployment, which was originally supported by civil engineering firm Trust Construction, is now said to be in the process of expanding their construction work into the Hartsholme area of the city. But a quick look at local street works suggests that they’re currently still busiest around the Glebe Park and West Lindsey areas.

The work supports the operator’s wider ambition of covering up to 8 million UK premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity, c.£4.9bn debt and c.£800m of BDUK subsidy) – or around 30% of the UK – by the end of 2025 (here). CityFibre’s network currently covers 3.5 million UK premises (3.2m Ready for Service) and they’re aiming to grow their network coverage by another 1 million premises in 2024, albeit via a mix of new build fibre and acquisitions (M&A activity alone could theoretically add up to 1.5-3 million extra premises to their coverage).

CityFibre is based in London and is owned by funds managed by Antin Infrastructure Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mubadala Investment Company and Interogo Holding.

Bashir Ahmed, CityFibre’s Partnership Manager for Lincoln, said:

“Our Lincoln build is at an exciting stage, as more residents are able to benefit from unparalleled digital connectivity.

We’d like to thank the people of Lincoln for their support as we rollout this critical infrastructure, which will bring with it a boost in productivity, innovation and investment gains not to mention a new era of lag-free gaming, streaming and work.”

The original announcement in 2021 noted that CityFibre would aim to complete their deployment to “almost every home and business” in the city during 2024, although at the current pace we wouldn’t be surprised if this slipped a bit into 2025. The town is also home to gigabit-capable broadband rivals such as Virgin Media (VMO2 + nexfibre / Upp) and Openreach, as well as smaller builds from ITS Technology, Spring Fibre, FibreNest and OFNL.