CITYFIBRE has said a full fibre network roll-out in Wokingham would be ‘a natural progression’ as it approaches the midway point of its project in Reading.
The telecommunications company is currently installing superfast broadband in Reading and parts of Wokingham and West Berkshire as part of a ‘once in a generation’ infrastructural overhaul.
The new superfast broadband is set to introduce significant economic and productivity benefits but has come under fire for recent disruption caused by roadworks.
Stacey King, regional partnership director, said: “We are looking at Wokingham. It is a ‘candidate city’, which means we’re currently doing our investigations, looking at the business case for expanding further. So we’ll be announcing those things as and when they come.”
“We’re always looking to expand the network wherever we can.”
Although the southernmost boundary for the current Reading build is set in-line with the M4, Ms King said providing the whole of Wokingham with its own full fibre network as a ‘natural progression’.
She stated the scope of this expansion was determined by the budget available to the privately-funded company and the local authority’s willingness to work with CityFibre.
The team currently meets with representatives from Reading and Wokingham Borough Councils fortnightly to discuss where building will take place to identify any sensitive areas.
Ms King explained: “We want to build the best possible network, the UK is behind the curve with our digital infrastructure. There’s been a lot of underinvestment in this area.
“From a CityFibre perspective, we wanted to spark a bit of a change, really pushing us forward as an economy and underpinning that with the best digital infrastructure we possibly can.”
The company’s UK plan involves building in 60 towns and cities, with 280 locations announced in total.
Once completed, CityFibre will make up a third of the national roll-out, as per the government’s mandate for communications in 2025.
Ms King explained: “When people think about broadband, they think about sending an email, watching a film and streaming, things we don’t expect to go wrong, and that’s as it should be.
“But there’s much more important, really fundamental things that this is going to enable. Things like 5G, having a good fibre backbone is really important for the next generation of technology in moving forward.”
The company’s ‘build once’ strategy means that what is being built now will be so comprehensive CityFibre will not have to come back again.
The benefits residents will experience on a day-to-day basis range from enhanced healthcare provision to live updates of free spaces at car parks.
A full fibre network has become even more essential since the Covid-19 pandemic, with a societal shift to remote working and pressure on public services encouraging people to self-serve.
In September, Reading experienced significant disruption to travel because of roadworks conducted by CityFibre.
Ms King said: “We met with Cllr (Tony) Page beforehand, we all knew it would be difficult. Caversham is quite traffic-sensitive at the best of times. Any work you do there is always going to cause additional disruption to people.
“We talked about [scheduling] for a long time and it didn’t feel like there was any better time to do it.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Ms King speculated that taking advantage of reduced traffic during the pandemic could have minimised disruption. However, the unpredictability at the time made it difficult for any works to be planned with certainty.
When working on traffic-sensitive areas, she stated the team’s desire to engage in dialogue with the local authorities, putting forward their ideal working conditions and listening to feedback.
Of the Caversham Bridge works, Ms King explained: “[The council] said you’ve got to stay either side of the rush hour, you can’t work during rush hour, which is what we tried to do in that particular instance, but it’s a bottleneck.
“That’s when you then take the decision of, do you take it slower and cause disruption for longer, or try and condense it and try and get through that as fast as possible, and that’s what we ended up doing.”
