4. How does CityFibre intend to tackle the problem of high deployment costs and have you investigated the prospect of using BT’s future Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product (the mechanism that offers access to BT’s existing cable ducts and telegraph poles) as a solution?
CityFibre (Mark Collins):
High deployment costs are a fact of life for a network infrastructure builder. Ensuring that the project is fully financed before undertaking a project is essential in order to avoid the problems faced by the Bournemouth project before our involvement. Our management team has decades of experience in the deployment of highly successful network roll-outs and will be taking a responsible and proactive approach to the financing and delivery of all CityFibre projects.
We want to make use of ready-made ducts where we can so that we can avoid the cost and inconvenience to the local area of road digs and at the same time increase the speed of roll-out. Any opportunity to use ducts such as BT’s PIA product will be evaluated at the planning stages and decisions will be made on a project by project basis.
5. Virgin Media, and most recently even BT, have both pledged to make 100Mbps broadband services available to residents in Bournemouth between this autumn 2011 and the end of 2012 respectively. BT’s promise to deliver 1Gbps capable FTTP technology, as well as its slower 40Mbps FTTC solution, into the area is particularly interesting as FTTP and CityFibre’s solution are similar.
Naturally this represents an additional pressure on the CityFibre project, which has only just managed to restart work. How do you intend to fight against the strengths of two such well established operators?
CityFibre (Mark Collins):
The shocking reality is that Britain is lagging behind almost every other European country in terms of FTTP infrastructure rollout and is the only one set to miss ‘fibre maturity’ targets of 20% market penetration by 2020. We believe that connecting the UK to next generation access networks, fit for purpose for the next 30 years, is not a small task. If we are to achieve this effectively, infrastructure providers must cooperate to maximise UK coverage, make up lost ground and ensure the country stays competitive in the years to come.
We really want to reiterate that we are not in competition with companies like BT and Virgin, as first we are not a service provider and second, our business is here to help further their plans and ultimately help them to deliver next generation services to their customers. As infrastructure providers, we need to work together to make sure the UK is connected.
The network we are continuing to build in Bournemouth is true FTTH rather than FTTC, which is the only method that will ensure we have a network which will support services and applications for decades to come. FTTH is the only future-proofed infrastructure solution and though headline speeds may currently be matched by other technology, none can compete with end-to-end fibre networks for exponential bandwidth growth.
Our carrier grade and open access network, already reaches over 20,000 homes and is the largest of its kind in the UK. It will be ready for services by the end of the year and we intend to extend the Bournemouth network to almost all homes by mid 2013. The network is designed for service providers to make use of it. We are not a broadband service provider, so we are not competing to sell services. We are an enabler, an infrastructure builder, working hard to extend the reach of fibre to the premises throughout the UK which ultimately allows end-users to benefit from more reliable, superfast services.
