CityFibre and Fujitsu Join Forces to Deploy Fibre Optic Broadband in UK Cities

CityFibre Holdings, which builds Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) style fibre optic infrastructure, has announced a new engineering agreement with Fujitsu that will progress their plans for deploying ultrafast broadband (100Mbps+) services “throughout the UK’s second tier cities” to reach 1 million homes and 50,000 businesses.

The contract, which is estimated to be worth an initial £50 million, will give Japan-based Fujitsu responsibility for “key elements of planning, building and operating CityFibre’s carrier-grade” fibre infrastructure. It’s believed that the firms involvement will also help to “accelerate” CityFibre’s current plans.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“We are delighted to be working with Fujitsu. It is invaluable to have an outsourcing partner of such reputation working with us in our roll-out of transformational fibre infrastructure to over 1 million UK homes and over 50,000 businesses throughout the UK’s second tier cities.

Fujitsu’s credentials in network deployment could not be stronger and few companies have as much knowledge of UK telecoms infrastructure. They are uniquely positioned to assist CityFibre in meeting our ambitious objectives across the entire fibre infrastructure spectrum, from mobile backhaul to metro networks and Fibre-to-the Premises.”

Andy Stevenson, CEO of Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe, added:

“We are very happy to embark on this agreement with CityFibre. This project takes advantage of all Fujitsu’s core competencies including planning, building and operating next generation access networks across the world. We are excited by the opportunity to work with such a forward thinking company and look forward to delivering world-class infrastructure across the UK.”

Few will be surprised by today’s news. Fujitsu is known to have built CityFibre’s 103km fibre optic / Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network around the City of York, which went extremely well for the developer and is now being expanded for use by local homes (here).

The operators next rollout, which is part of their longer-term £500 million plan (original news) and will be based around CityFibre’s “unique open access wholesale model“, is expected to commence during this Spring 2012. CityFibre has yet to confirm precisely which “second tier” cities it will focus upon, although this apparently includes areas that suffer from a “lack of critical fibre infrastructure“.

But CityFibre are likely to face increasingly aggressive competition from major rivals, such as BT, which are already threatening to gain an advantage by making use of the governments new and sometimes controversial £150 Million Urban Broadband Fund (details).