Some 50 family homes in Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) have been selected as the first to trial Vodafone’s new Gigafast Broadband product, which is based off the 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network that is currently being deployed by Cityfibre to cover 1 million UK homes in up to 12 of their existing cities by 2021.
The £500m Phase One deployment (details) has already confirmed that Milton Keynes would be the first city to be covered (here), which alone should cost around £40m. Since then several additional cities have also been confirmed, including Aberdeen, Peterborough, Edinburgh, Coventry, Huddersfield and Stirling (accounting for about 500,000 premises and £315m of the planned investment).
If all goes well then Vodafone have indicated that there’s the “potential to extend” this “full fibre” deployment to reach up to 5 million homes by 2025 (approximately 50 towns and cities, representing 20% of the current UK broadband market), which would require significantly more investment.