Urban fibre optic network developer CityFibre has today appointed the former CEO of BTWholesale, Sally Davis, to the role of non-executive director in the hope that the operator will be able to draw on her “considerable experience” to help build on their recent expansion and investment wins.
CityFibre recently secured approximately £16.5m after confirming their admission to and trading of Ordinary Shares on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange (here). On top of that they’ve also won a vital £35m deal to roll-out an independent metro fibre optic and telecoms network around the city of Peterborough in the East of England (here).
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Since then CityFibre has been busy preparing for more expansion and investment, which last year resulted in the similar appointment of former Colt CEO, Peter Manning, as another non-executive Chairman.
Sally Davis said:
“CityFibre has a bold vision to enable UK cities to compete with their fastest European counterparts. It is already delivering pure fibre infrastructure into businesses and homes in prominent cities, including York and Bournemouth and has recently announced a huge investment in fibre infrastructure in Peterborough.
CityFibre is one of a very few businesses committed to providing pure fibre connectivity as opposed to fibre-to-the-cabinet [FTTC] technology relying on the old copper-based network. I am delighted to be involved with a company with a vision to bring the huge benefits of ultra-fast connectivity to UK cities.”
The news comes immediately after Gigaclear announced that it too had snapped up a former BT boss in the shape of ex-Openreach CEO Steve Robertson (here). Clearly former BT chiefs are somewhat in demand at the moment.
Meanwhile Greg Mesch, CityFibre’s CEO, said they’re currently talking with city councils across the UK about expansion of their fibre optic broadband network and that Sally’s appointment was “a further validation of our strategy“.
Greg Mesch, CityFibre’s CEO, added:
“It is beyond doubt that we are now the best-placed alternative fibre infrastructure provider. We are in discussion with city councils across the UK, who can see from evidence in other countries, just how transformational the effect of pure fibre can be; increasing productivity, enhancing public services and attracting businesses.”
The challenge for CityFibre will now be in turning these new public sector focused networks into a service that lots of businesses and possibly even homes will also want to use (the latter probably won’t happen for a while after Bournemouth’s failure to attract many residential customers), which has often proven difficult in the face of existing services from the big and established operators like BT and Virgin Media.
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