Great news for fibre to the home in the UK

CityFibre was very pleased to hear yesterday’s news that Hyperoptic has secured a £50 million investment to help meet its ambition to bring fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) to more than 500,000 homes in the UK. With the UK lagging behind the rest of Europe when it comes to the availability of superfast broadband, this type of investment and commitment is exactly what the UK needs.

Pure fibre to the home is the only network architecture that will meet the ever-growing bandwidth demands of consumers, and it is widely acknowledged that superfast broadband services delivered over FTTH are the end-game of next generation Internet access in the home, capable of meeting consumers’ needs both now and in the future.

Summarised by Hyperoptic, “other so-called ‘superfast fibre’ service providers are generally hybrids, relying on existing infrastructure and dated copper cables to make up at least part of the line, resulting in drastically reduced internet speeds and unpredictable performance’. The UK needs to invest in building pure fibre infrastructure to eliminate these problems and provide esidents with access to the same high-quality services enjoyed elsewhere.

CityFibre is currently the largest provider of open access FTTH in the UK and recently made a commitment to bring next-generation access to over one million homes in the next five years. In Bournemouth, our fibre-to-the-home network passes over 21,000 homes and our service provider partner Gigler is delivering gigabit-speed services, which are revolutionising users’ online experience and enabling them to get so much more from the Internet.

A recent Gigler customer survey highlighted how customers are now able to watch more TV and films online, and that the service has also proved very popular with the gaming community due to its millisecond response times. Gigabit speeds have also enabled more efficient home-working, giving consumers the ability to take advantage of next-generation services such as cloud-services and online back-up. We continue to follow Google Fiber’s success in the USA with great interest, to hear about the benefits that its service is bringing to communities. Along with huge improvements in home entertainment and home-working, FTTH can also provide significant benefits for healthcare. In Holland, the elderly and immobile are benefitting from video consultations with doctors from their sitting rooms – transforming the way that healthcare is provided to residents.

Currently the UK is the only European country set to miss a ‘fibre maturity’ target of 20% of all homes directly connected with fibre by 2020. We need to change this, and Hyperoptic’s great news is a huge step in the right direction.