CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent full fibre infrastructure network, has announced the launch of the UK’s first wholesale 2.5Gbps symmetrical consumer broadband product. The launch heralds a new era of affordable, multi-gigabit broadband services for millions of UK homes, putting an end to the age-old battle for bandwidth.

The new 2.5Gbps product is being made available to its Internet Service Provider (ISP) customers on a rolling basis, starting in CityFibre’s most mature XGS-PON deployment areas, before reaching all homes served by its rapidly expanding XGS-PON platform in the coming months. The new platform is capable of supporting symmetrical speeds of up to 10Gbps and is designed to be easily upgraded to 50G PON, virtually unconstrained in its ability to meet future demand.

By the end of 2023, CityFibre expects to have deployed its XGS-PON equipment into over 90% of its fibre exchanges with the new 2.5Gbps product becoming available to around 20% of its ready for service footprint, currently standing at 2.5m homes.

Importantly for CityFibre and its customers’ net-zero plans, all services provided over XGS-PON offer significant carbon savings compared to GPON. This is due to XGS-PON equipment being twice as power efficient and able to support more ONT connections per port.

Multi-gig speeds will also be available for homes where CityFibre’s network is yet to be upgraded to XGS-PON. This will be achieved via a 2Gbps/1Gbps asymmetric GPON product that CityFibre plans to launch in the coming months. These services will ultimately be migrated to the XGS-PON platform when available.

CityFibre’s new multi-gig products lead the wholesale market in terms of price, minimum speed guarantees and install times. CityFibre’s symmetrical 2.5Gbps service is 2.5 times faster than BT Openreach’s asymmetric 1Gbps product, at half the rental cost per megabit. It also provides more than 20 times the upload speeds of BT Openreach’s piloted 1.8Gbps GPON services.

CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch said: “With the launch of the UK’s fastest and most cost-effective connectivity products, we are demonstrating the benefits of infrastructure competition and raising the bar for all wholesale networks. Ubiquitous, high-quality, low-carbon connectivity is the keystone of all advanced and community-wide applications of the future. By working with our ISP partners to bring symmetrical multi-gigabit broadband consumer services to market today, with businesses to follow, the UK will finally have a network and services that will enable our future, rather than holding it back.”