ISPs Approved for Cityfibre’s Full Fibre Network in West Sussex UK

Cityfibre has announced that two ISPs (Exa Networks and JSPC Computer Services) have been approved to provide education and business connectivity services over their forthcoming Gigabit capable fibre optic (FTTP / Ethernet) network in West Sussex, which is being built as part of a new contract with the county council.

The project was actually one of the first to be awarded under the Government’s £190m Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) challenge fund during May 2018 (here). As part of that deal, which has a total lifetime value of £52.7m, Cityfibre will construct a new “future-proof full-fibre network” to connect 152 council sites in Bognor Regis, Burgess Hill, Chichester, Crawley, Haywards Heath, Horsham, Littlehampton, Shoreham and Worthing.

Construction of the new network is anticipated to begin in August 2018, with the first connections expected to be activated during early 2019. Under today’s deal JSPC Computer Services, in partnership with specialist education and business ISP, Exa Networks, will be able to connect schools and businesses to the new ultra-fast service, DarkLight, as they come within reach of it.

Mark Cowgill, co-Founder and Director of Exa Networks, said:

“Exa is delighted to be expanding our DarkLight service into West Sussex. It is an area in which we have worked very closely with our accredited partner, JSPC, for the past six years, and we have all been working very hard to bring our multi-gigabit service to the area. This will make a huge difference to schools and businesses throughout the county.”

James Stoner, MD of JSPC Computer Services, said:

“We’ve been working with Exa as their accredited partner for years now across West Sussex, Surrey and London, and we’ve seen what they have done with DarkLight in other parts of the UK, so we have been working very closely together to get this to our home county as quickly as we could. This is a massive boost for the area, for our schools, and the businesses we support.”

The new network is obviously more focused on the public sector and businesses, although Cityfibre’s separate UK partnership with ISP Vodafone also offers a glimmer of hope that in the future their joint deployment of a new 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband service could possibly be extended to local residents in West Sussex (here).