CityFibre Completes Build of 1Gbps Fibre Optic Network in Peterborough

After 11 months of hard work CityFibre has today announced the completion of their work to build a new 1000Mbps capable and 90km long fibre optic FTTP broadband network around the city of Peterborough (East England).

The Peterborough CORE deployment, which forms part of a partnership with Peterborough City Council (East of England) and IT services provider Serco, officially began work last April 2014 and aimed to put the network within reach of over 4,000 businesses (80% of the city’s firms) and various public sector organisations.

So far around 100 businesses have already signed orders to take the service, including Businesscoms, Rydal Communications, Consulting Networks and Cyberware, with hundreds more having previously expressed an interest. A total of 107 public sector sites will also be connected by the new network and its Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

Greg Mesch, CityFibre CEO, said:

“In less than one year Peterborough has been transformed into a Gigabit City. With a future-proof digital infrastructure at its heart, Peterborough has a digital head-start on the rest of the country. Its public sector is already more efficient and capable of innovation while its business community is becoming more competitive and productive.”

Marco Cereste, Leader of Peterborough City Council, said:

“We cannot overstate the value of a gigabit speed digital infrastructure to our city. As a Gigabit City, we have a significant competitive advantage over other areas and are able to lead the way with an innovative and integrated digital strategy. Businesses are hungry for bandwidth and we recognise that because of this network, Peterborough is becoming an even more attractive place to build a business.”

However it’s noted that CityFibre now intends to expand the network beyond the original goal. In particular the rise in demand from local businesses has resulted in a plan to deploy the fibre into four new business parks in the city including Fengate, Lynch Wood, Cygnet Park and Orton Southgate (this will cover a further 1,000 firms).

It’s worth remembering that CityFibre’s original announcement also touted an aspiration for future deployments to local residents via a “second phase“, which might one day extend the service (FTTH) to reach around 60,000 local homes. We suspect this would adopt a similar model to the operators joint deployment with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk in York (here).

But for the time being this is just an aspiration and it’s worth remembering that both Virgin Media and BT already have hybrid-fibre based superfast broadband networks in the ground around Peterborough, which always makes life more difficult for new entrants.