CityFibre Covers 90,000 Wolverhampton Premises with FTTP Broadband

Network operator CityFibre has revealed that their £50m project to deploy a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the West Midland’s city of Wolverhampton, which began all the way back in July 2020 (here), has now covered over 90,000 premises (homes and businesses).

The announcement states that the operator has “completed its rollout across several areas of the city“, where homes and businesses have been designated ‘Ready For Service’, although it seems to shy aware from mentioning which areas will be the next to benefit and by when. In fairness, they have now covered most of the city, albeit missing out the most central area inside the ring road and a large area to the south of that.

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).

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

“We’re thrilled to have over 90,000 premises in Wolverhampton Ready For Service, offering people across the city all the benefits of full fibre connectivity. We would also like to thank residents for their patience as we have rolled out this essential digital infrastructure and we hope to see more people in the area unlock seamless homeworking, streaming and gaming. Our investment in Wolverhampton’s digital foundations is set to benefit the local community for years to come.”

CityFibre’s main gigabit-capable competitors in the city are Openreach and Virgin Media (VMO2), although some smaller networks like Grain and Hyperoptic have also deployed their full fibre infrastructure into a few specific areas.