CityFibre Presentation Talks Wholesale, Take-up and Future UK Broadband Plans

The Strategy Director for 10Gbps capable full fibre UK broadband operator CityFibre, Clayton Nash, has given a new lecture to members of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) that reveals some interesting details about the company’s network roll-out, wholesale pricing, take-up and future plans.

The network, which has long aspired to reach up to 8 million UK premises (c.30% of the UK) and in late January 2026 suffered more redundancies (here), currently covers 4.7 million UK premises (4.5m RFS) and recently revealed (here) that their take-up had grown rapidly to total 848,000 customers (up by 64% from 518,000 at the same time last year).

The new lecture by Clayton Nash, which is available as a 1 hour+ YouTube video below, doesn’t say too much that we don’t already know about CityFibre’s plans. But it does include some information that we haven’t really seen being articulated much in public before and is thus worth watching.

For example, Clayton’s slides state that CityFibre’s wholesale full fibre (FTTP) broadband products are around “40%” cheaper than Openreach’s comparable products, which varies across the tiers. At speeds of 160Mbps, CityFibre is shown to be 24% cheaper, while at 1000Mbps (1Gbps) it’s 37% and for Multi-Gigabit this falls back 25%.

However, it’s also worth remembering that CityFibre’s tiers also offer symmetric speeds, while Openreach’s uploads are currently significantly slower, so cost isn’t the only factor to consider. The lecture also offers an interesting overview of how much network capacity they’ll need in the future.

The lecture also touches on customer take-up, which shows that CityFibre is now home to “above 900,000 customers” and will “hit a million fairly soon“. Clayton says CityFibre currently has a take-up rate of about 22% (they’re using the RFS premises figure for this), which they say compares will with the c.15% take-up at many other altnets (CityFibre currently expects to exceed 30% penetration by the end of 2026).

On the subject of consolidation, which recently saw CityFibre lose out to VMO2’s parents in the battle for Netomnia (here), Clayton confirms that the operator still “intend to kind of work” their way through the above list of alternative networks and “pick up a number of these altnet entities” in order to help them reach “8 to 10 to 12 million homes” in the future.

You can view the full lecture from the IET Anglian Coastal Network below.