CityFibre has awarded its first round of construction contracts to build partners under the UK Government’s Project Gigabit programme.
Project Gigabit is a £5 billion initiative designed to bring full-fibre broadband to 715,000 rural properties, ensuring communities currently underserved by legacy networks gain access to high-speed, future-proof connectivity.
CityFibre’s appointed build partners for this initial phase are:
- Granemore Group in Cambridgeshire
- OCU Group and CCN Communications in Hampshire
- OCU Group in Norfolk
- Telelink, OCU Group, and Granemore Group in Suffolk
With these partnerships confirmed, CityFibre will begin construction across the targeted areas. The first homes set to benefit are in Cambridgeshire, where service provisioning is scheduled to start in October.
The four Project Gigabit contracts awarded to CityFibre total £387 million, secured through a competitive procurement process. CityFibre is also committing significant private funding—£223 million—bringing the combined investment in these projects to more than half a billion pounds.
CityFibre’s national full-fibre footprint already passes over 3 million premises, with more than 2.7 million premises marked as “Ready For Service.” The company aims to expand its full-fibre network to cover up to one third of the UK, and this year expects to make roughly one million homes Ready For Service, reinforcing its position as the country’s second-largest full-fibre platform.
In areas where CityFibre’s network is established, consumer take-up is nearing 30 percent, reflecting growing adoption as fibre availability increases.
A core element of CityFibre’s rollout is the deployment of XGS-PON full-fibre technology. XGS-PON enables Internet Service Providers operating on CityFibre’s network to offer significantly higher speeds and improved reliability to both homes and businesses.
Today, XGS-PON supports speeds up to 2.5 Gbps—roughly 35 times faster than the current UK average broadband speed—and the technology is capable of delivering up to 10 Gbps in the future. That capacity ensures rural communities served by Project Gigabit will have access to world-class connectivity for years to come.
Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, commented:
“We’re excited to get our Project Gigabit rollouts underway, bringing faster and more reliable broadband connectivity to hundreds of thousands of rural homes and businesses in areas that were at risk of missing out.
With the legacy copper networks in these areas soon to be made obsolete, we look forward to providing all ISPs with a powerful new network from which to better serve their customers.”
As CityFibre advances these deployments, the new full-fibre networks are expected to have a transformative effect on rural residents and local businesses by closing the digital divide and delivering high-quality, resilient internet access.
See also: UK invests £88M in Open RAN initiatives transforming mobile connectivity
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