Vodafone accelerates fibre push with CityFibre rollout to 8m homes
Vodafone has agreed a major expansion of its strategic partnership with CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent Full Fibre platform, with a nationwide rollout of up to 8 million homes.
As part of its £4bn investment programme, CityFibre’s rollout will deploy dense Full Fibre infrastructure in 285 cities, towns and villages across the country by 2025.
The expansion builds on a landmark strategic partnership agreed in November 2017 in which Vodafone committed to market ultrafast consumer broadband services across a one million home CityFibre footprint in 12 cities.
The deal makes Vodafone the UK’s largest retail provider of Full Fibre to consumers. It also marks Vodafone’s continued support for the expansion of Full Fibre networks across the UK and determination to encourage wholesale infrastructure competition at scale in the market.
Anchored by the increased commitment from Vodafone, CityFibre is making a substantial investment into a new National Access network, connecting its growing footprint of local Full Fibre networks.
Using the new National Access network, Vodafone and other wholesale partners will ultimately be able to provide Full Fibre services to any premises on CityFibre’s networks. Each new customer ordering a service from a partner will be offered an installation date within just 5 working days of placing their order.
This has resulted in Vodafone’s market leading “Gigafast” services achieving twice the rate of take-up over CityFibre’s footprint compared to its market share in other parts of the country.
Ahmed Essam, chief executive at Vodafone UK, said: “We want to see a competitive market that brings the benefits of full fibre to more people. We’ve had a very successful partnership with CityFibre since 2017, and we look forward to continuing working together to connect more of the UK to Full Fibre. Through our partnership with wholesale providers, we’re going to be bringing Full Fibre to more homes than any other retail provider.”