Cityfibre Sign Onecom to Support Southend-on-Sea Fibre Optic Network

Cityfibre has today signed a new 5-year and £1.7 million deal, which commits UK business ISP Onecom to be the launch partner for their new ultrafast (1Gbps+) fibre optic broadband (FTTP) and Ethernet network in Southend-on-Sea (Essex, England).

The network itself, which was first announced as a 10-year project between Cityfibre and Southend-on-Sea Borough Council in March 2016 (here), will cost £3.24 million to complete. Under the plan some 120 public sector sites will be connected by the network and after that the infrastructure will be made available to help provide capacity for local mobile masts and up to 6,000 businesses.

Interestingly the original announcement talked about the network being 50km long, although today’s news suggests that it will actually extend to almost 100km. Otherwise the agreement commits Onecom to a minimum of 150 business customer connections across the network.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“We’re delighted to add Onecom as our 50th service provider partner relationship and our launch partner to deliver superior pure fibre connectivity solutions to the business community in Southend. Onecom’s national base of over 300,000 customer connections is testament to its established reputation for quality and customer service, making it an ideal addition to the CityFibre partner universe.”

Apparently Cityfibre has now sold a total of 270 connections on its new Southend asset, which they claim represents an incremental unit sales uplift of 125% above the original anchor customer commitment inside of only 6 months. Meanwhile the network itself is currently still under construction and should go live by around April 2017.

It’s worth pointing out that Cityfibre has also worked with Openreach to test the operator’s new Cable Duct and Pole Access product in the town (here), which essentially requires BT to give rival operators more access to harness their existing network of underground cable ducts and overground poles. However they’ve struggled to find ducts with enough free space.