Openreach 900/100 vs Cityfibre 900/900.

Hey all,

So I live in Worthing and openreaches 900/100 FTTP product is now available where I am, but I also notice Zen is releasing the Cityfibre 900/900 offering this month.

The cost for 900/100 on Zen's website is - £69.95 monthly
£54.95 set-up fee
vs
Cityfibre at - £40.00 monthly
free set up (normally £29.99*)

The only negative I've read about Cityfibres service is it has a lot more people sharing the same "pipe" so to speak, so is that the sole reason it seems much cheaper than openreach?

Different cost base? Does City Fibre just use Openreaches ducts and poles - with its own backhaul?

City Fibre only deploys in dense areas?

Community Fibre follows a similar model and is in the same price league,

All their own backhaul. They use Openreach PIA

Story on them yesterday over at ISPreview:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/01/cityfi...

Cityfibre's stated goal is to reach only 8m properties - which is about 27% of the UK - by 2025. (They are at about 0.5m now).

Basically, they cherry-pick the places which are cheapest to serve, which allows them to undercut Openreach. Openreach aren't allowed to set different prices for different locations.

For both Openreach and CityFibre, each service provider provisions their own backhaul to their own POPs. The amount those are under- or over-provisioned is up to each service provider.

Openreach's 900/110 and CityFibre's 900/900 services use the same underlying technology: GPON, one fibre carrying 2.4Gbps down, 1.2Gbps up, shared between up to 32 properties. Cityfibre are allowing higher over-subscription in the upstream direction. For most users this won't make much difference; and in any case, it's better to be able to burst up to 900M intermittently than be limited to 110M all the time.

Great. Thanks all for the information.

They’re certainly on a mission. Goldman’s have backed them with war chest worth £2.5 billion and apparently they’ve brought on board Bechtel to help them construction manage the 26 different network construction contracts they’ve signed nationally. It’s a massive and rapid programme alright.

Both Cityfibre and Openreach use GPON with configuration of 1:32.
Openreach could tomorrow make their service Symmetric if wanted to but they have chosen to be Asymmetric.

I would keep watch on these site to find out when it lunches in you part of Worthing. Citybre likes open there network in town in waves,

https://www.cityfibre.com/residential/
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/deals/gigafast
https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/ultrafast-fibre-broa...

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Openreach's 900/110 and CityFibre's 900/900 services use the same underlying technology: GPON, one fibre carrying 2.4Gbps down, 1.2Gbps up, shared between up to 32 properties. Cityfibre are allowing higher over-subscription in the upstream direction. For most users this won't make much difference; and in any case, it's better to be able to burst up to 900M intermittently than be limited to 110M all the time.

That depends what other users on the same port on the OLT are doing. If you have a couple of heavy users doing uploads then you may could easily be better off being limited to 110M all the time.

In reply to a post by amiga_dude:

https://www.cityfibre.com/residential/
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/broadband/deals/gigafast
https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/ultrafast-fibre-broa...

That Zen link doesn't show me a price but I'm 99% sure their 900/900 on CF is £40. Vodafone's is £45. What happened to Zen being expensive!

Yea there was a guy installing some yellow cable on the telegraph pole outside yesterday.

They didn't cherry pick the cheapest place - they responded to a local government tender to provide a dark fibre network using the local authorities as anchor tenants. There was also central government funding from the LFFN fund to help make the project viable.

By using the council as an anchor tenant they were able to run dark fibre to the council buildings and at the same time lay dark fibre for use by business and residents. CityFibre then act as a wholesaler to ISPs that sell the services to the public.

According to Greg Mesch CF can offer cheaper prices because they don't have any existing copper products. OR can't undercut their existing copper based products.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

That Zen link doesn't show me a price but I'm 99% sure their 900/900 on CF is £40. Vodafone's is £45. What happened to Zen being expensive!

I got the CF Zendesk price from - https://www.zen.co.uk/broadband/ultrafast-fibre-broa...