back to article CityFibre relieves TalkTalk of its FTTP sister biz for £200m – after Boris win blows away Labour's nationalisation vow

Goldman Sachs-backed telco CityFibre has snapped up TalkTalk's fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network for £200m, two months after the deal was delayed during the general election. The sale, subject to shareholder approval, will include TalkTalk's entire network and customer base in the areas it has networks. The acquisition will …

  1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

    I know people on here like to moan about talk-talk, but their network (as setup under opal telecom) is pretty good.

    If they decide to ditch that, and just become a reseller, they'll only be keeping the things they're really bad at!

    1. Bob H

      Disclosure: I previously worked for TT, but not in Broadband.

      Many of their issues come from the fact that they are a mismatch of different companies which were absorbed and integration of those different businesses over the years has created massive legacy. Furthermore a more significant part of their issues with provisioning and maintenance comes down to OpenReach and the way they are integrated with them. The installation of my staff incentive phone line was a farce, but it all started to go wrong with an OpenReach engineer failing to check the right boxes, then rectifying that clerical error took too long and was too hard.

      TT had invested substantially in their core network and its capacity was astounding, they had the fastest DNS cluster for customers in the market and the fibre core capacity was good. One area they struggled with was again BT, they are largely dependent on BT and even when they have their own kit in exchanges they often need to use BT's fibre to get to the exchanges. Some BT exchanges are just child exchanges of larger exchanges and so they only have limited data capacity upstream. That being said TT's ADSL2 kit was ancient and was desperately in need of retirement.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The acquisition will increase CityFibre's coverage from five million to eight million premises in the United Kingdom."

    Correction: it will increase CityFibre's *plans* for coverage from 5m to 8m. Current coverage is around 0.2m, including this deal.

    TalkTalk will be very happy though. £200m for a network covering 49,000 homes means over £4,000 per home, or around 10 times what it would have cost to build.

    1. NeilPost Silver badge

      Yes... it’s the same bollocks as Virgin Media saying their Project Lightning will ‘reach’ 17m homes in one breath and then saying Copper DOCIS 3.1 Gigabit to 15m homes from the Cabinet. Which is it ???

  3. WonkoTheSane
    Facepalm

    FTFY

    "The acquisition will increase CityFibre's *plans for* coverage from five million to eight million premises in London."

    1. theloon

      Re: FTFY

      The clue is in the name... CITYfibre ;)

      1. NeilPost Silver badge

        Re: FTFY

        Carlisle , Derry, Ely, Hereford, Inverness, Lichfield, Lisburn, Newry, Perth, Ripon, St Asaph, St Davids’s, Truro, Wells, Winchester rejoice then !!

        1. davenewman

          Re: FTFY

          And Belfast, Oxford, York and Canterbury.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: FTFY

            Can you show me a link for the Oxford information, as I can't see it on CityFibre's or FibreNation's websites?

            1. Vometia Munro Silver badge

              Re: FTFY

              Via Entanet, where I get a whopping 13 Mbits over my "fibre" connection.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: FTFY

              Oxford hasn't been announced as part of the CityFibre rollout.

              It's just someone trolling that the name "CityFibre" implies that every "City" will be getting it (including the city of Wells).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: FTFY

      London is the one city that is completely excluded from CityFibre's rollout.

      There's too much existing fibre in the ground from the big players; too much bureaucracy when digging up the roads yet again; and too many altnets in play fighting for the scraps.

      And Inverness is included.

      1. NeilPost Silver badge

        Re: FTFY

        To use the horrible Americanism they will probably make CF (London) “TownFibre” then for when visiting London people ‘come in to Town’.

        1. phuzz Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: FTFY

          BigSmokeFibre? OverpricedEverythingFibre? SmugArseholeFibre? TaxExileFibre?

          There's plenty of options.

          1. druck Silver badge

            Re: FTFY

            BlackBogiesFibre?

            1. This post has been deleted by its author

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