CityFibre Reveals Plan for Ultrafast City Wide FTTH Broadband Service in York

CityFibre Holdings, a UK fibre optic infrastructure developer for business, public sector and consumer purposes, has announced that it plans to expand upon their existing network in the city of York by launching a city-wide Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) style ultrafast broadband ISP service for local homes and businesses.

The firm intends to make good use of its new 10Gbps (Gigabits per second) capable and 103km long fibre optic ring network, which was completed last year and is already delivering superfast connectivity to 104 council buildings and facilities including schools, libraries and sports facilities in York.

The City of York Council (CYC) believes that such a development would help it to meet their current goal, which aims to provide 95% of all its businesses with access to a minimum internet connection speed of 25Mbps by the end of 2014.

James Alexander, Leader of City of York Council, said:

“High speed Internet access is essential for success in a modern world and we’ve already benefitted from this in terms of delivery of council and local NHS services as well as trialling free Wi-Fi access.

Now we want to take this to the next level to allow York’s business community to benefit from this superfast digital network to help them develop new markets, attract new customers and be more competitive on both a national and international level – a truly exciting prospect.”

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, added:

“Our collaboration with City of York Council is leading the way as a solution that allows all public, private and residential sectors to be connected across a pure fibre optic infrastructure designed with digital services in mind; sparking economic growth, innovation and job creation.”

York is currently home to well over 200,000 people and, according to Ofcom’s latest 2011 data, delivers an average “modem sync” (not quite real world performance) broadband speed of 7.1Mbps to local premises. Furthermore some 13.4% of premises are unable to receive speeds of 2Mbps or greater. Clearly there’s room for improvement. Both CityFibre and the CYC will now begin a detailed planning exercise to decide the best way forward.

CityFibre will also need to be mindful of the many problems that were experienced during similar work in the south coast city of Bournemouth, where the deployment of an FTTH solution was met with a mix of technical, legal and cost problems. Bournemouth’s network is now moving forward (here) but the aggressive competition from BT and Virgin Media hasn’t made life easy for CityFibre and it will want to avoid a repeat in York.

Today’s news is all part of CityFibre’s longer-term £500 million plan to connect UK local authorities, 50,000 businesses and 1 million homes through their growing fibre optic infrastructure.