CityFibre Confirm Ultrafast Fibre Optic Rollout Timetable for Peterborough UK

CityFibre has confirmed that its recently announced £30 million project to deploy a new ultrafast metro fibre optic broadband and telecoms network around the city of Peterborough (East of England) will begin during Spring 2014.

The strategic partnership with Peterborough City Council, which was formally unveiled at the end of last month (here) and will today be signed at the city’s Town Hall, expects to make broadband speeds of up to 1000Mbps available to local businesses (e.g. mobile operators requiring fibre base-station connectivity for 4G capacity etc.), the public sector and eventually.. possibly.. even homes.

The first phase is expected to be completed within 18 months and by the end of the project CityFibre should have installed 90km of new core fibre optic infrastructure throughout the city.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“Fibre Broadband is widely viewed as the utility of the future and pure fibre networks, such as the one we are deploying in Peterborough, are the only future-proofed solution. Networks such as this are the foundation of our Gigabit city vision. There are over 100 towns and cities in the UK that currently do not have ultra-high speed connectivity, so the opportunity for CityFibre to play a part in modernising the UK’s digital infrastructure is extremely exciting.”

CityFibre currently manages over 100 private fibre projects (i.e. 30,000km of fibre in the ground) in 50 towns or cities and seven separate metropolitan fibre networks under long-term contract with local authorities (e.g. York), police forces, healthcare organisations and universities.

The group also claims to own “the largest FTTH project in the UK … with over 21,000 homes ready for service [in Bournemouth]“, although we’re fairly confident that Hyperoptic has just surpassed that in London and not forgetting BT’s FTTP/H lines.

Never the less it’s wonderful news to see alternative projects like this progress. However Peterborough’s home users shouldn’t get their hopes up. The group’s similar service in Bournemouth has struggled against local competition from rival ISPs (e.g. BT and Virgin Media) and the situation in Peterborough would be very similar.