TalkTalk CityFibre to start Derby FTTH build in spring

CityFibre has announced that it will construct a £45m ($57.5m) 1 Gbps fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband service in Derby, with work beginning late this spring. The firm aims to connect nearly every home and business, and is likely to use its existing dark fibre network in the city as a foundation for the upgrade.

Wednesday, Mar 11th, 2020 (11:44 am) - Score 2,826

After a long wait Cityfibre has finally confirmed that they will begin the £45m build of a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband ISP network in the Derbyshire (England) city of Derby during “late spring” 2020, which will aim to cover “nearly every home and business” (usually reaching 85%+ of local premises).

At present the operator already has a Dark Fibre network in Derby, although we couldn’t find any solid details about this on their website. Nevertheless Cityfibre usually uses their existing Dark Fibre infrastructure as the foundation for their “full fibre” build-out to local homes. The operator has also appointed Dominika Walker to be their local City Manager for the build.

All of this forms part of Cityfibre’s wider £4bn private investment plan (here), which aims to deploy a Gigabit capable “full fibre” broadband network to cover around 1 million UK premises by the end of 2021, before potentially reaching their ambition of 8 million premises across 100+ cities and towns by the end of 2025 or later (c.30% of the UK).

Andy Starnes, Head of City Development at CityFibre, added: “We are thrilled that Dominika has taken on this new role and will be using her experience to drive the city project forward for the benefit of its residents and businesses. Our ‘fibre to the premises’ programme is going to be a game changer in Derby and nobody is better placed than Dominika to drive home the message and help people discover more about the impact this investment will have on their city’s digital future.”

The work is being fully supported by Derby City Council and its domestic UK ISP partners, such as Vodafone. A number of other providers, including TalkTalk, will also be able to offer services over the same network in the not too distant future.

As usual Cityfibre’s main competition for gigabit connectivity in the city is cable operator Virgin Media, which already covers the vast majority of local premises. Openreach also has a bit of FTTP in outlying areas and they’ve deployed some slower hybrid fibre G.fast (100Mbps+) services around a fair few central areas of the city. Interestingly Glide has also connected a few areas to full fibre, albeit more business focused.