CityFibre start project gigabit broadband build in Cambridgeshire UK

CityFibre has announced that their £69m state aid supported Project Gigabit broadband rollout contract for Cambridgeshire and adjacent areas (Lot 5), which was awarded in March 2023 (here), has finally entered the build phase. A total of “around” 45,000 hard-to-reach homes and businesses in the county are expected to benefit.

At present the operator is better known for their deployments of a new 10Gbps capable FTTP (full fibre) network across urban parts of the UK, but over the past year they’ve secured several rural-focused contracts under the UK Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit rollout scheme too. The aim of this project is to help extend 1Gbps capable (download) networks to reach at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, before hopefully achieving “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030.

The work also supports CityFibre’s wider ambition of covering up to 8 million UK premises (funded by c.£2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt) – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). The operator has already passed over 3.5 million premises (3.2m as Ready for Service) and they aim to add another million during 2024.

Construction under the Cambridgeshire contract has now started, following extensive planning and design work, with the first locations in the county to benefit from the new network including Fen Ditton, Grantchester and Milton. The operator notes that the new infrastructure will also unlock a further £53m of commercial funding, which will separately enable them to reach a further 170,000 premises in the county.

The network operator has pledged to work closely with local stakeholders to “ensure disruption is minimised and that the build is managed safely and efficiently“. Typically, teams will only remain in each road for up to three days at a time, and residents will be contacted ahead of any work starting. In terms of the service itself, CityFibre is supported by various ISPs such as Vodafone, TalkTalk, Zen Internet and many others, but those will only come into play once the new network starts to go live.

On the other hand, the new Project Gigabit contracts will represent a big challenge for an operator that has, until now, largely focused on conducting more cost-efficient urban builds. CityFibre’s limited rural trials do give them some prior experience, but it remains to be seen how well they cope with doing such a project at scale. The operator has already had to re-focus their build engine toward these contracts, which has created its own issues with build suspension in other commercial locations. ISPreview