Thrusting Vodafone along road to 8 million homes
CityFibre has been declared as the second largest full fibre network in the UK, having measured its fibre footprint at 1,083,888 premises. This accelerates it past Virgin Media, which is has a more static total of 1,076,721 premises on the fibre-o-meter. Race observers were expecting an overtake to take place on Thursday or Friday this week but, after a ‘very good day auditing locations’ of where CityFibre was live, it reported on Monday that it had added 11,555. This number dwarfs the radio frequency over glass (RFOG) / fibre to the premises (FTTP) additions made by Virgin Media, whose vans trundled at relatively glacial speed to 210 premises.
Driven by Vodafone
Vodafone is the largest retailer on the CityFibre network and has an ambition to be the largest retailer of full fibre in the UK. It has set itself an ambitious target to sell FTTP to 8 million premises by the end of Spring 2022. Think Broadband has released details of its most recent audit, which concentrated its checks on the areas in which CityFibre is active and which Vodafone is known to be targeting. It reported that “there are still CityFibre areas without Vodafone as an option”.
Openreach
However, based on its figures it made the prediction that the overlap between Openreach and CityFibre full fibre shows there would be 7,881,493 premises with FTTP connections, according to its database. In addition, Openreach should contribute another 200,000 premises to that total. However, its figures have not been audited for five weeks. Nonetheless, said Think Broadband’s Internet Service Provider report, “it is clear the 8 million figure is very close and Vodafone may reach it before summer officially starts even without all CityFibre towns and cities having Vodafone available.”