Register to let us know you’re interested in a Community Fibre Partnership (don’t worry, you aren’t committing to anything at this stage). We’ll then email you a reference number, and details of what will happen next.

Around 24 hours later we’ll send you a second email with a link to a website. You can use this to fill in details of the addresses, postcodes and landline numbers of other local people who are interested in setting up the Partnership.

At this point we’ll give you a ballpark cost to bring fibre to your area. We’ll cover some of the costs, so the price in the quote will be what we call ‘the gap’ i.e. the amount your community will need to pay.

You’ll now need to share this with your community. You might also want to talk to other local people or businesses about helping with funding (if you haven’t done that already).

You might also be able to get Government funding which could cover more than three quarters of the gap – for example if there’s a school or charity in your community you could be eligible for a grant of up to £30,000. Or the Gigabit grant might be able to help.

At this stage, we’ll need you to tell us if you want to go ahead, or if you’ve decided not to take things further (there’s still no obligation to do anything though).

Now it’s time to get the community together to raise the money (we can help you with fundraising ideas).

You’ll need to pay 50 per cent of the costs when you sign the contract. Then you’ll pay the rest of the balance when we finish the installation. This is usually around a year after you’ve signed.

We partner with a local community to put a joint funding agreement in place to upgrade them to fibre broadband – so we cover some of the costs and the community clubs together to fund the rest. We’ll then build the most affordable solution we can, and advise on any grants available to help.

Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) is an optical fibre from the exchange to the green cabinet in your street and then copper from the cabinet into your home providing download speeds of up to 80Mbps. Final speeds are dependent on each property's distance from the fibre cabinet but you can typically expect a minimum of 24Mbps at a range of approx. 1,200 metres from the cabinet. The nearer the property is to the cabinet, the greater the speed.

Gfast lets us get amazingly high speeds from the same copper pipe that was originally used for voice calls. To put it in perspective, in terms of speed, voice uses about 64kbits, while Gfast offers 330Mbps. With those speeds you could have a 4K TV running in every room of your house simultaneously.

Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) is an optical fibre that goes all the way from the exchange into your home or business. It offers speeds of up to 330Mbps. It's sometimes referred to as ‘Full Fibre' because the fibre runs from the telephone exchange all the way to the interior of the property.

Gfast and FTTP complement each other. There are some locations where FTTP is the obvious choice, like new-build houses, flats and rural locations, whereas Gfast lets you get a quick footprint of higher speed broadband, as it lets us reuse the copper cable.

Yes, Openreach provides access to its network to all broadband providers, on an equal basis. This means that wherever we deploy fibre, a whole range of different  providers can offer broadband, bringing plenty of choice to consumers and local businesses. 

The exact amount will depend on how much work we need to do, and what type of fibre you want i.e. whether you’d like a full fibre solution all the way up to each property with Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) or if you’ve asked for a new cabinet with Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC). 

We’ll give you an estimate of your costs as early on as we can so you can decide if you’d like to go ahead. You’ll only be asked to cover costs above those of our commercial model.  When you agree to proceed we’ll ask you to pay 50 per cent of your costs when you sign the contract before we start work, and the final 50 per cent when we finish. There are also various grants and voucher schemes available which could help cover your costs.