CityFibre awarded five new contracts to roll out super fast fibre

By Nicky Godding

7 February 2024

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Rural areas across Warwickshire, Sussex, Kent, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire can look forward to super fast broadband after CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent full fibre platform, was awarded five new contracts under the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit programme. These will subsidise the rollout of full fibre infrastructure to more than 202,000 rural properties across these, and other areas, that would otherwise be excluded from commercial rollouts.

The five new contracts total more than £394 million of government subsidy. In line with its strategy, CityFibre will continue to expand and densify its significant existing network footprint in these areas alongside Project Gigabit, extending its rollout to almost 450,000 additional premises across the awarded regions within its 8m rollout programme, bringing the total premises benefiting from the new awards to around 651,000. Detailed planning will begin immediately with the first premises expected to be connected in early 2025.

CityFibre is already delivering Project Gigabit contracts in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Hampshire. Alongside the latest contracts, this represents more than £782 million in government subsidies and unlocks almost £1.2bn in combined public and private investment in rural broadband.

With Project Gigabit subsidies targeted at locations not addressed by commercial build plans, CityFibre will be the only full fibre network available to those homes and businesses and to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that serve them.

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive Officer at CityFibre, said: “We’re thrilled to be a key delivery partner for the government on this critical infrastructure project, transforming the digital capabilities of rural homes and businesses across the country. But that’s just the start. We’re continuing to expand our commercial rollout alongside Project Gigabit, extending infrastructure choice, multi-gigabit speeds, and unparalleled reliability to hundreds of thousands of additional premises in these regions.”

By Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe.

After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts.

She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.