Cityfibre has announced that the construction of their pure fibre optic ultrafast broadband and Ethernet network in the city of Glasgow (Scotland) has now begun moving westwards into the Finnieston area, where a number of local businesses have expressed an interest in receiving their service.
The first civil engineering work finally began in November 2016, after it was delayed by quite a few months due to a decision that saw their nearby Edinburgh Gigabit City project taking priority (here). Since then their network in the centre of Glasgow, which connects into an existing 31km long fibre network, has been busy rolling out to new areas.
Some of the first streets and businesses to benefit were those positioned near Ingram Street, Renfrew Street and Douglas Street. The network now spans Glasgow city centre, including the Merchant City area, and various businesses have already connected (e.g. Holiday Inn Express, Robb Ferguson Chartered Accountants etc.).
However over the next few weeks Cityfibre’s demand-led roll-out will also be moving into the Finnieston area through Bath Street, Sauchiehall Street and Sky Park.
James McClafferty, Cityfibre’s Head of Regional Development, said:
“Glasgow’s telecommunications infrastructure has been a high profile concern for city businesses for many years as they strive to keep ahead of digital trends.
We are very excited to be investing in Glasgow and it’s fantastic to see the new infrastructure is already transforming connected businesses’ digital experience. This will ultimately help them become more productive and competitive and enable them to invest in new opportunities and tools which depend on resilient, reliable fibre connectivity.”
Various businesses in the forthcoming areas have already expressed an interest in being connected via the project’s ISP partner HighNet. Construction of the new network is expected to complete before the end of 2017 when it should be able to reach about 7,000 businesses, although they hope to one day cover 15,000.
As usual Cityfibre’s PR claims that its network, which is currently being deployed around 42 UK cities, can “address” 28,000 public sites, 7,800 mobile masts, 280,000 businesses and 4.0 million homes. However as we keep saying, such claims are potentially very misleading because Cityfibre’s hypothetical “addressable market” measure of coverage is NOT the same as the more recognisable “premises passed.”
We’d measure the actual premises passed coverage of Cityfibre’s network for UK homes in the tens of thousands (e.g. Bournemouth and York) rather than the bonkers 4 million stated above. Under the premises passed coverage the fibre optic cable must be almost right outside your house (e.g. doorstep or pavement) for it to count, while under ‘addressable market’ the fibre could be quite a long way away. The ‘cost’ and ‘time to install’ difference for these two measures can be huge.
Comments are closed