Summary of ISP Choices on CityFibre’s UK FTTP Broadband Network

CityFibre has spent the past few years building their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to 2.6 million premises (2.3m Ready for Service) and slowly solidifying their position as the UK’s third-largest infrastructure player after Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media. Suffice to say, it’s time for a summary of ISP choices on their network.

At present the operator, which is being funded by around £2.4bn in equity and c.£4.9bn debt, aims to cover up to 8 million premises (mostly in urban areas) – across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here). But they may well continue to grow even after this, possibly reaching 9-10 million premises, although a solid rollout plan for that has yet to be confirmed.

All of this means that they’re fast becoming a serious player in the UK market, although trying to gauge the consumer ISP options on their network can be tricky. This is due to the fact that supporting Internet Service Providers (ISP) aren’t all live or available across every location they serve, yet.

Some of this issue has to do with historic exclusivity agreements between specific providers (e.g. Vodafone) and CityFibre for certain areas, but in other cases an ISP may have only invested enough to serve a limited number of locations. Whatever the reason, this can result in a patchwork of availability between supporting ISPs, which may in turn cause consumer confusion.

On top of all that, a growing number of ISPs are now supporting multiple alternative network platforms, which makes it difficult for even us to know whether the package being presented for a specific location is based off CityFibre’s network or that of another operator. Often we can tell the difference, but not always, particularly with providers that are poor at communicating such details (many of them). This is important because package details and prices do differ between networks.

Summary of CityFibre ISPs

Despite the challenges, we’ve endeavoured to create a brief summary of CityFibre’s ISPs below, which focuses on how much each of them charge for their top gigabit class (1Gbps) package – often advertised via an average download of 900Mbps+. By default, we’ll focus on data-only packages (no phone) and will pick the cheapest option (i.e. usually the one with the longest contract term). The list is ordered by price, but we exclude temporary short-term offers / discounts, such as “x months of free service” (too tedious to track).

Take note that the operator’s wholesale products typically promise symmetric speeds, thus uploads should match the download rate. But due to the requirements of Ofcom’s speed code and the desire to have a single package for different networks, some ISPs may advertise a slower upload (i.e. underneath this it will still be a symmetric product on CityFibre’s network).

The good news is that several of CityFibre’s ISPs have confirmed their delivery of, or ambition to deliver, national scale availability across the operator’s network. As a result, we’ve opted to list those providers separately at the top, although other ISPs may have similar plans and perhaps haven’t informed us or confirmed them yet (e.g. we think AAISP is heading in this direction).

CityFibre ISPs with National UK Availability (1Gbps Plan)

In total, CityFibre currently claims to have attracted support from 36 ISPs, although at present our own UK ISP Listings database only covers around 26. This is because some of those that remain may be more business centric (not covered), or might not have informed us that they exist (Submit ISP), while others could have made it too difficult to identify their CF availability or packages (e.g. Factco, YouFibre, WestFibre etc).

As a side note, it is possible to migrate between CityFibre based ISPs, but this is currently a Losing Provider Led (LPL) process, where you’d need to start the switch by contacting your existing ISP first. Ofcom’s new Gaining Provider Led (GPL) One Touch Switch (OTS) migration process was supposed to change that from 3rd April 2023, but that is now facing significant delays due to implementation problems.

Take note that special offers change all the time, thus what is considered to be the cheapest provider now may vary from week to week. We also won’t be returning to keep the prices in this article up-to-date, as we’ll use this report to help track historic changes and simply write a new article if we feel an update is needed.

CityFibre ISPs with Patchy UK Availability (1Gbps Plan)

As we mentioned earlier, there are some significant differences in terms of package features, prices and availability on CityFibre’s network, some of which we’ve highlighted below. But there are also big gaps in our knowledge due, in no small part, to the lack of easily accessible information from some ISPs. But most providers tended to roughly hover around the c.£40 per month mark.

Finally, it’s important to note that we’re not recommending any specific ISPs above. This is thus purely a high level summary and also a way of highlighting the challenges we faced in simply putting such a list together. Over time, CityFibre’s exclusivity agreements should wane and ISP-level availability will improve, which will hopefully help to iron out some of the issues we experienced.

NOTES:

➤ AAISP – Packages come attached to a 1 TeraByte usage cap (£67 if you want 10TB). Doesn’t bundle a free router, like the rest, but does support IPv6.

➤ BrillBand – Serves CityFibre’s locations in Scotland.

➤ FibreHop – Only available to Cheltenham, Leicester, Milton Keynes, Bath (soon) and Swindon.

➤ Gigabit Networks – Focused on the Midlands. Experienced an odd problem when trying to conduct a test order, as under Firefox and Edge we couldn’t get past the availability checker’s address selection page.

➤ RunFibre – Only in Wolverhampton and Gloucester.

➤ Toob – Cityfibre coverage in Portsmouth.

➤ Vodafone – Existing mobile customers can save an extra £3 per month on the price we display above. WiFi 6 capable router.

➤ Giganet – Currently offering 3 months of free service. Adding a Static IP is just £1 extra. WiFi 6 capable router.

➤ YouFibre – Currently only sells via CityFibre outside Middlesbrough (North Yorkshire), but we struggled to find a working postcode for checking. Elsewhere, they harness parent operator Netomnia’s network.

➤ BrawBand – website points to availability in Glasgow, Inverness, Renfrewshire and Edinburgh (Scotland). Packages also included 1 year of Amazon Prime Video and a Static IP address.

➤ Toob – Prices their own-build FTTP the same as their CityFibre based package.

➤ iDNET – Includes Static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, but doesn’t bundle an included router.

Just a final reminder that the data above was all gathered in early February, thus some of the price, package and availability details may have since changed. It’s not easy keeping track of a market this complex.

UPDATE:

Take note that TalkTalk’s CityFibre price changed from £36 to £49 at the start of March, just after we finished writing this. The prices in this article need to be maintained for historical accuracy, thus we’re mentioning it here as it occurred just outside our editing period.