CityFibre’s FTTP Broadband Finally Starts Going Live in Loughborough

After some false starts earlier in the year, at least some residents and businesses in the Leicestershire (England) market town of Loughborough should finally be able to connect to CityFibre’s new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network in the area after it started to go fully live.

At the start of 2024 we were told that Loughborough was one of CityFibre’s locations with ‘Ready for Service’ (RFS) premises (here). Similarly, some locals noted to ISPreview that CityFibre’s website had been reporting positive service availability for several months, but they then struggled to confirm this via any actual ISPs (this is a known problem with some of CF’s builds, which causes consumer confusion).

The operator eventually informed us that their £17m build in Loughborough was one of a “small number of locations” where services were now expected to be available to residents by the “summer” (2024). The good news today is that CityFibre appears to have held to that revised target, as confirmed by the latest analysis from Thinkbroadband.

The local coverage is currently still quite limited, but it is live in certain areas, albeit seemingly only orderable via TalkTalk (for now). In addition, parts of their build in Halifax have also gone live and via a wider selection of ISPs.

The work supports CityFibre’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) – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK), although it’s unclear precisely when they will achieve that (the original goal was for the end of 2025, but their current build + M&A plan may only get them to c.6m). The operator currently covers 3.6 million UK premises (3.3m RFS).