CityFibre vs Openreach

I am nearing the end of my Zen contract which is for a 100 Mbps connection via OpenReach. During the contract period City Fibre has become available at my address and it would appear that I could now have a new Zen contract via City Fibre which would be significantly cheaper. What are the pros and cons of going with a City Fibre connection? I realise that it would mean an additional overhead cable and ONT.

In reply to a post by HughA:

I am nearing the end of my Zen contract which is for a 100 Mbps connection via OpenReach. During the contract period City Fibre has become available at my address and it would appear that I could now have a new Zen contract via City Fibre which would be significantly cheaper. What are the pros and cons of going with a City Fibre connection? I realise that it would mean an additional overhead cable and ONT.

I have been on a CityFibre connection for nearly fours years, originally with Zen, and have no complaints. Once there was a outage for a few hours due to a cable problem a few miles away. Otherwise it's just worked.

Pros: faster upload speeds, and higher maximum speeds in XGS-PON areas. But if you find a 100/20 service is sufficient anyway then that's unlikely to be of interest to you.

Cons: if using Cityfibre's own physical infrastructure (microtrenching) then arguably it may be more likely to fail in the long term. But if they're using Openreach ducts and poles then it should be more or less the same.

Cityfibre POPs ("FEX") have on occasion been known to fail, but so have OR OLTs.

Therefore, I think in your case the cost is the significant deciding factor.

Thanks for your input. OpenReach and CityFibre are both overhead connections from a pole so if I went CityFibre I would have three overhead connections to my property as the old copper wasn't taken down when I got fibre.

Edited by HughA (Sat 26-Jul-25 12:16:50)

If you're in a copper stop-sell area, and there's no active service on the copper line, and the pole is at its load limit, they *could* decide to take down the copper line when installing the new fibre.

Previously only OR themselves could do this, but I believe there was a change that let PIA operators do it as well.

Admittedly the pole in question is by my front gate, and we're a bit rural, but the OR engineer said I could take down the copper drop wire my end and wrap it round the pole, at my leisure.

Decided to stay with the OpenReach connection as Zen have offered me a significant reduction to match the price of a CityFibre connection. Happy with that as its £4.50 less than I was paying before and I dont have the hassle of a new overhead line and ONT.

approaching 2 yrs with City Fibre and IDNet, 3 minor outages lasting no more than 10 minutes.

3 short outages in 2 years is pretty good. I feel like I've had around 10 in the last 18 months with Zen. Most are fairly short but I've had 2 in the last couple of months that went on for like 6 hours. I'm not sure if this is normal or whether I've been unlucky but it's my only gripe with Zen. I'm going to try IDNet next and see if things are any better.