CityFibre UK Begin £115m FTTP Broadband Rollout in Sheffield

CityFibre has this week announced the start of a £115 million project to deploy their new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the South Yorkshire city of Sheffield, which will take 5-years to complete. The first civil engineering is due to commence next Monday (8th Feb).

The work forms part of the operator’s wider £4bn investment programme (here and here), which currently aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 (so far they’ve covered 500,000 premises) and then 8 million across 100+ cities and towns (c.30% of the UK) – the latter target is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025 (this may well depend upon how they define ‘substantially’).

At present the operator already has a Dark Fibre network in Sheffield, which it acquired back in 2015 – after they spent £90 million to gobble up KCOM’s network assets across the United Kingdom (here). The existing network is already used to serve local businesses (via Exa Networks), but it can also act as the foundation for helping to cover local homes.

Cityfibre’s civil engineering partner for this build is O’Connor Utilities and they intend to start work next Monday (The Star), which will see the first street works taking place in Darnall and Wybourn. Some 40% of this build will involve underground cable, which suggests that much of the rest may be deployed via local telegraph poles.

The difficulty for Cityfibre in Sheffield, which is home to around 600,000 people, is that they’ll be entering a city with lots of growing competition between rival gigabit networks. At present Virgin Media is already available to most of the city (albeit with plenty of large gaps), while Openreach seem to be slowly expanding FTTP and Hyperoptic also has a strong presence in large MDU buildings (apartments).

On top of that Pine Media are currently on course to cover 50,000 premises in the city with their own FTTP network (here). In some areas Cityfibre might thus risk going into direct competition with as many as four other gigabit providers, which would put a strain on the rollout model of any operator. Suffice to say, we’ll be keeping a close eye on developments in Sheffield to see how the local market evolves.