Cityfibre UK Joins European Alliance to Boost Full Fibre Broadband

Fibre optic UK network builder Cityfibre has today announced that they’ve joined Deutsche Glasfaser, Open Fiber, Reykjavikur and SIRO as signatories of a new alliance, which aims to promote a wholesale-only build model and end the misuse of “fibre” terminology in consumer broadband ISP advertising.

Cityfibre has built or manages around 50 Dark Fibre style networks across the UK, which exist mostly in urban areas and are usually designed to cater for public sector sites and businesses. On top of that they’re currently also working with ISPs like Vodafone and TalkTalk in order to build out several large 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks for residential consumers.

Senior leaders from similar operators in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Iceland, as well as chief representatives from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) and the FTTH Council Europe, met in Rome this week to discuss the future of the telecoms market and the barriers to deployment and uptake of the next-generation infrastructure. Apparently the result was today’s alliance.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“Wholesale only has been at the heart of CityFibre’s strategy from day one. We are leading the rollout of full fibre infrastructure across the UK, deploying modern digital infrastructure to millions of homes and businesses, empowering all service providers, mobile operators and digital innovators.

It is the new generation of fibre infrastructure operators that are building FTTH faster, quicker and cheaper than incumbent legacy operators, and CityFibre welcomes collaboration with our alliance partners across Europe.”

The alliance aims to follow the new European Electronic Communications Code (EECC) and will position wholesale-only as the ideal roll-out model of very high capacity networks “due to their natural ability to offer access to multiple telecom service providers without bias, discrimination or abuses“.

By the sounds of it this will be a sort of lobby group that aims to educate governments, regulators and financial investors in the benefits of deploying “full fibre” connectivity, as well as promoting awareness of independent fibre networks to ISPs and mobile operators. As part of that they will also jointly work to try and prevent slower hybrid or party fibre (e.g. FTTC) providers from “misusing” fibre terminology in their adverts (example).