CityFibre Grabs New Talent from TalkTalk, BT and Other Big Telco Names

CityFibre, which specialises in deploying fibre optic broadband networks around some of the United Kingdom’s second tier cities, has expanded its team by hiring a number of recognisable names from the wider telecoms industry, including a few that hail from the senior levels of TalkTalk, BT Scotland and Geo Networks (now owned by Zayo Group).

The business certainly had a busy 2014, what with its joint Sky Broadband and TalkTalk deployment of 1Gbps FTTP to homes in York, plus major Gigabit City projects in Peterborough, Coventry and Aberdeen, several PSN contracts and not to mention that long-term national framework agreement with mobile operators EE and Three UK.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“With the steady growth in partners and city projects it became clear we needed to bring further expertise into the business and increase our leadership team. Over the last year we have added over 120 years of senior experience, designing, building and operating fibre based networks.

This team have worked with some of the most successful businesses in the global telecoms ecosystem and it is great that CityFibre can now leverage that knowledge and experience as our growth continues to accelerate.”

In case anybody is interested, here’s the list of the operators newest talent, direct from the horses mouth.

CityFibre’s New Hires

· John Franklin appointed as Head of Engineering and will lead all CityFibre’s architecture design, planning, service delivery and the operation of all networks. He has nearly 25 years’ experience including an SVP role for Level 3 in Denver, Colarado and as COO of euNetworks in London.

· John Pulley joins CityFibre as Sales Director responsible for growing revenue across the existing and fast growing local access fibre footprint. John has worked with a number of telecoms, mobile and technology businesses including Cable & Wireless, Sprint and mBlox where revenues more than tripled to $85m during his tenure as VP Sales & Marketing.

· Neil Styles appointed as Head of Systems and Development, ensuring CityFibre’s systems and technical strategy are in place to support the company’s rapid growth. As a founding member of Demon Internet in the earliest days of the UK’s dialup industry, Neil has had over 20 years in top technical roles driving change and strategy. Other roles included Director of Architecture and Strategy at Tiscali and Technical Strategy at TalkTalk.

· Mike Dixon joins CityFibre from Geo (now Zayo) where he spent the last 13 years. Mike will be Head of Delivery responsible for the rollout of all new city networks. Mike specialises in managing multi-disciplined project teams to implement dedicated network infrastructure for data centres, corporates and capital projects in the UK.

· James McClafferty has joined CityFibre as Head of Regional Development, Scotland where he will develop city Investment and Sales Strategy with partners, with an initial focus on CityFibre’s latest Gigabit City project in Aberdeen. James will help nurture and develop new anchor investments partnerships, whilst maximising existing partnerships and networks. He joins from BT where he spent 14 years in a number of business development, sales, partnership and regional leadership roles across BT Wholesale, BT Group and BT Ignite. James is a Board member of ScotlandIS which champions Scotland’s digital technology industries.