Superfast broadband is becoming the norm in many households across the country with more people connecting more devices to the internet than ever.
There’s also a large chunk of the UK workforce doing their job from home, even as restrictions ease, putting even more pressure on broadband providers to deliver a fast, reliable and affordable service.
And now broadband builder, CityFibre, is considering plans to expand its roll-out of full-fibre internet and connect 8 million homes to its gigabit-capable network.
However, that could expand to 10 million under the new plans being considered, which CityFibre aims to “substantially complete” by 2025.
CityFibre has already reached 650,000 homes and wants to hit a total of one million by the end of the year.
By comparison, BT-owned Openreach, which is used by a whole host of familiar brands from BT and EE to Sky and TalkTalk, has already connected 4.5 million homes to its gigabit-capable cables.
But, Virgin Media is still the leader of the superfast pack and on track to deliver 16 million connections by the end of 2021.
Virgin Media has already spoken about extending its full-fibre network to another 7 million premises in the coming years, meanwhile, Openreach hopes to reach 25 million premises by 2026.
Provided these companies all manage to stick with their proposed timelines, CityFibre is on course to become the third-largest supplier of full-fibre broadband in the country.
Either way, more gigabit-capable broadband across the UK is a good thing for customers.
Gigabit-capable connections can reach speeds of 1,000Mbps or higher. While the latter might be a bit overkill for most people at the moment, these will be a necessity as new technologies, like 8K video streaming, Virtual Reality games, and more, become mainstream.
Busy households with multiple people streaming video, backing-up their data to the cloud, downloading video games or operating system updates, making video calls, streaming music, or multiple smart home gadgets, including Alexa and other smart speakers, home security and video doorbells, will need much, much more bandwidth than the 80Mbps experienced by most people across the UK right now.
To fund its expansion, CityFibre is looking for new investment in the business.
As well as cash from the UK Government’s £5 billion “Project Gigabit” war chest to upgrade broadband speeds across the country, the internet supplier is now in talks with 20 pension and infrastructure funds from the UK, North America, Europe and Australia.
CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch said: “We’re going faster than we ever have. We were able to build quicker because the pandemic had everybody off the roads – or at least out of the way. And unlike BT and unlike Virgin, we didn’t stop. We remobilised, we recommitted, we went stronger.”
However, in regards to Mr Mesch's comments, an article in ISPreview pointed out: "In fairness, the comment about BT and Virgin Media having stopped their build is not entirely correct.
"While Virgin Media’s deployment did slow a bit during the lockdowns, it clearly did not grind to a complete halt for those periods. Likewise, Openreach still achieved their build target of 4.5 million premises passed by the end of March 2021, which was set before the pandemic began."
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