CityFibre now has 1 million full fibre connections

CityFibre is celebrating that it has 1 million households and businesses signed up to its full fibre network now, and there is a further around 16,000 connections for mobile operators and other corporate/local authority bodies.

“We have built a nationwide, full fibre network to be proud of and, today, CityFibre is trusted by millions to power their digital lives. The UK shifted up a gear with the arrival of the altnets and CityFibre continues to challenge the incumbents and deliver the benefits of competition to households, businesses and partners right across the country.”

Simon Holden, Chief Executive Officer, CityFibre

“This milestone shows the difference government’s pro-investment environment is making, helping bring fast, reliable broadband to homes and businesses in some of the UK’s hardest-to-reach communities.

Our investment in broadband infrastructure, including through Project Gigabit, is helping companies like CityFibre reach more communities, faster. We’ll continue to remove barriers to rollout and back the investment needed to deliver the digital infrastructure people rely on every day — whether that’s working, learning, running a business or staying connected with friends and family.”

UK Telecoms Minister, Liz Lloyd

While we are pleased with the announcement of a key mile stone for take-up, I will upset CityFibre as a I raise the question over whether “CityFibre has built full fibre digital infrastructure that now reaches nearly five million premises“.

The Ready for Service footprint for the full fibre XGS-PON network as sold by retailers to households and SME that we have mapped is at 4.37 million with a steady 0.02 million that is in the passed but not showing as Ready for Service category. On the 1st January 2026 we had mapped 4.32 million RFS premises, so we are distance from hitting 4.5 million when PR rounding could say 5 million. We suspect CityFibre is counting both its XGS-PON footprint and the metro ethernet footprint which has very different RFS criteria and is still more of a custom build, and that will take them closer to the 5 million.

1 million customers if we use our RFS figure gives CityFibre a take-up of 22.9%, versus 20% if the footprint is 5 million.

Two years ago I’d have simply said that the difference is because of the lag in being able to track the RFS footprint, but as the rollouts have slowed and today it is the Project Gigabit subsidised and adjacent commercial build which while incredibly important for those seeing their first full fibre option is a lot smaller in terms of footprints.

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