With the CityFibre full fibre footprint in terms of availability of the Vodafone Gigafast service now sitting at 175,335 premises the pace of building appears to have increased. Though we would caution against extrapolating the extra 9,000 in the last six days into anything long term just yet, the reason being we tend to spot the activity in bursts so there is a danger we may find no more in February.
Milton Keynes has seen the largest expansion but a lot of the recent activity has been on roads where Openreach FTTP was already available and in Coventry some of the expansion is starting to creep into Fibre FIrst areas. While people will complain that this overbuilding is reducing the overall footprint, it does need pointing out that both of these full fibre services are in Coventry overbuilding the Virgin Media cable network which is on its way to offering a 1.1 Gbps service.
The increasing footprint comes at a time when the Vodafone Gigafast services are on special offer with the 500 Mbps service at £30/m is just £2/m more than the 100 Mbps product. The 900 Mbps service is also on offer at £40/m, all the pricing is based on 18 month contracts. There are options to add the Apple TV 4K service and unlimited calls for £8/m more but this also increases the contract length to 24 months and while it includes the Apple TV hardware the Apple TV+ subscription is only for 1 year, after which it is £4.99/m.
The Apple TV box is £149 if bought on its own and includes a years Apple TV+ subscription so the £192 extra in the two year contract is not good value unless you make a lot of phone calls and will make heavy use of the unlimited calls to UK landlines and mobiles that is also part of the Vodafone premium bundle.