Altnet ISP Community Fibre Tops 400,000 UK Broadband Customers
CommunityFibre, which has deployed a 5Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based broadband network to cover 1.342 million homes (inc. 185k businesses within 200 metres of their network) – mostly in London, has this morning announced that they’ve connected more than 400,000 properties (customers) to the service (up from 336k at the end of 2024).
The provider, which is currently being backed by funding of c.£1bn, has had a rough couple of years due to the rising cost of build, strong market competition and high interest rates (a common challenge in the market). All of this has caused a previous slowdown in network build and related redundancies (here and here), which resulted in CF pivoting their strategy to focus more on growing customer uptake.
The good news is that this strategy has clearly helped to boost their adoption, with CommunityFibre today reporting a 33% increase in its customer base over the past year, reaching a network penetration rate of 30%. “This makes Community Fibre the No. 1 major Alternative Network (Altnet) in the UK by customer penetration,” said the announcement. But if we leave out the word “major” then there are others, like B4RN (c.50% take-up), that have done better on the smaller scales.
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The ISP added that it has seen strong adoption of its high-speed products too, with the “majority” of its customers now said to be on speeds of 1Gbps or above, as well as an increased take-up of its top 5Gbps and 2.5Gbps products. All of this is likely to be further boosted by their recent wholesale agreement with Vodafone (VodafoneThree) – here.
Graeme Oxby, CEO of Community Fibre, said:
“Our relentless focus on network and sales excellence, lean operations, and industry-leading service is the foundation for sustainable success in the Altnet market. Community Fibre continues to prove that new broadband competition can not only be financially sustainable in the long run, it can also deliver meaningful advantages to UK society.”
Following their recent financial results (here), CommunityFibre today added that they are now “on course” for an annualised EBITDA (i.e. earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) of £70m by year-end, building on a current run rate of over £50m.
Community Fibre also provides free 1Gbps full fibre broadband to more than 720 community spaces in the city.
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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Will they start building again? I look after 3 properties within 500m of eachother and one has Community Fibre, another G.Network and the third nothing (FTTC that only goes 40mbps)
Not at a large scale, unless they can secure significant additional investment or, more likely, consolidate with another network. Time will tell, but take-up is going in the right direction.
I don’t think you could get a better merger pairing than City Fibre and Community Fibre. This surely must be under discussion behind the scenes. Can they agree on the each other’s value though.
I wished they started building again too. I live in a part of a borough left seemingly left behind by the likes of Openreach, Hyperoptic and Community Fibre on ThinkBroadband’s maps.
Fortunately in the past month Hyperoptic have passed my house and Openreach was available to order last week. Placed an order, CSP installed on the weekend and an installation date this week which is impressive.
Symmetrical uploads would be better for my uses, but personally I would trust an ISP with its engineering team based in the UK. Community Fibre is two streets down, but if they ever were to pass me, I would consider signing up.
Would love for them to start building too. Stuck in an void between CF and F&W that VM don’t want to service and OR aren’t building in yet. So annoying as it felt like we would have been done by now if they had kept going. Instead there is significant overbuilding in the surrounding areas.
Well done on the take-up figures. Some way to go, but nearly there.
However, I checked again today to see if they will offer a service to this low-rise MDU in London.
Again, they will not offer a fibre connection; however, they offer fibre connections to the postcode of an adjacent semi-detached property.
They must be missing out on a lot of business in London due to failure to provide full-fibre connections to residents of MDUs.
The CF checker has some problems. When CF did the fibre runs to my road, all my neighbours showed as available but my house did not – likely because it was an HMO 15 years ago (and still is listed as such on some rubbish address availability sources). I spoke directly to the sales rep who bypassed the availability by arranging for the appointment at the adjacent address but giving the engineers my phone numbers and getting the address updated in backend. Worth trying for yourself perhaps.
@MaSh:
Many thanks for the information. However, in my case, the building is a purpose-built MDU, so the records will be valid if they indicate it is as such.
Your example also illustrates the problem with CommunityFibre not making the effort to provide connections to such properties.
Given CommunityFibre’s apparent handling of MDUs, I would question what they mean by “1.342 million homes (inc. 185k businesses within 200 metres of their network)”.
Do they, or do they not, include residences in MDUs in that number?
If not, their take-up percentages would seem to be seriously overestimated.