Vodafone has agreed to become CityFibre’s anchor customer to at least 8 million UK homes.
The UK telco says its demonstrating support for wholesale infrastructure competition in the full-fibre market. The CityFibre rollout will deploy dense full-fibre infrastructure in 285 cities, towns and villages across the UK by 2025, and support the construction of a new national access network that will make it easier and faster for Vodafone to bring their full-fibre services to market.
Vodafone has also reached an agreement with Openreach that will allow it to start making its Vodafone Gigafast Broadband available from next spring to customers in Birmingham, Bristol and Liverpool, where the BT-owned infrastructure company is developing its the Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.
Max Taylor, Consumer Director at Vodafone UK, said: “Consumers need competition in the broadband space, and we’re committed to delivering that. Our partnership approach allows us to bring full-fibre to more homes than any other provider, ensuring families have more choice and more competitive pricing than ever before.”
The partnerships have the potential to push Vodafone to be the UK’s largest full-fibre broadband provider, potentially cherry-picking between where each of its partners has the better service.
For example in Cambridge, where Openreach capability is reduced, CityFibre is available. However, it would still face competition from Virgin Media that already has full-fibre in the city.
Greg Mesch, Chief Executive at CityFibre, said: “Through our strategic partnership, Vodafone has made a powerful decision to back CityFibre and help establish wholesale infrastructure competition for the UK. Thanks in large part to its continued support, CityFibre has now emerged as the nation’s leading independent Full Fibre platform, with the best wholesale products, attractive economics and a network scaling rapidly across the UK.
The CityFibre deal 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.
