Cityfibre Appoint Development Managers for Leeds and Huddersfield
Fibre optic network developer Cityfibre has today announced that they’ve appointed City Development Managers for their “city wide” 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network builds in Huddersfield (£30m project) and Leeds (£120m). Local homes will be supplied via UK ISP Vodafone.
Work on their roll-out in Huddersfield began last month around the town’s central west side (extending out from their existing 52km Dark Fibre network) and the first connected homes should be ready to go live during summer 2019 (here).
Meanwhile it looks as if the bulk of their deployment in Leeds (extension of an existing 117km Dark Fibre network) won’t begin until around May 2019 (Beeston area), although we have already seen one of their teams working in the Kirkgate area. The Leeds deployment will also require them to build six new data centres.
On top of that they’ve today appointed locally-based Kim Johnston and Stephen Moore as new City Development Managers (CDM) for Leeds and Huddersfield respectively. Kim was previously Leeds City Council’s Business Development Officer for the Health and Wellbeing, while Stephen has spent the last decade working for Kirklees Council, managing their business engagement team and as lead for digital infrastructure investment.
Rob Hamlin, Commercial Director of CityFibre, said:
“We knew as soon as we met Kim and Steve that they were the perfect candidates for the City Development Manager positions. They both have a wealth of great experience across key sectors and crucially, a passion for watching their communities flourish and develop.”
This is a transformational project for both businesses and residents across Yorkshire and we are delighted to have put great people in place to help people to discover more about the impact this investment will have on the region’s digital future.”
As stated many times before, all of this forms part of the network operator’s £2.5bn private investment to cover around 1 million UK homes by the end of 2021, rising to 5 million premises across 37 UK cities and towns by the end of 2024 (here). Generally the operator is aiming to cover around 85%+ of premises in each of the cities and towns they’ve named.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
« Study Suggests Home Broadband More Important than Sex in UK
Vodafone Hope to Banish Broadband Blackspots with Super WiFi »
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5516)
- BT (3514)
- Politics (2538)
- Openreach (2297)
- Business (2262)
- Building Digital UK (2245)
- FTTC (2044)
- Mobile Broadband (1973)
- Statistics (1788)
- 4G (1664)
- Virgin Media (1619)
- Ofcom Regulation (1461)
- Fibre Optic (1395)
- Wireless Internet (1389)
- FTTH (1381)
Great for Leeds and CityFibre. They’re certainly going to be busy bringing speeds up to the 1Gbps+ marker. And there is certainly a push for it around the country as a whole. Thing is, such initiatives only confirm what the critics highlight – they don’t add anything for those who ‘don’t have’ or ‘cant have’, in the remote and rural communities. They only increase competition and in turn pace, in otherwise prime investment areas. This paradigm is nothing new. Commercial investment will always need to see a return and only public intervention (the usual community schemes excepted) seem likely to bring on board that last few percent?
“Generally the operator is aiming to cover around 85%+ of premises”
There are currently there are no Ofcom obligations on providers such as Cityfibre to cover every premise or avoid creating islands. We all understand that there is a rollout point in rural where FTTP provision becomes uncommercial however most would expect it to be at much higher level in an urban environment. Whilst we welcome increased investment in FTTP it needs to be clearly understood that there may be a significant percentage in these Towns and Cities who will not benefit from FTTP for a very long time especially if other providers follow the same approach or place these locations low on the priority list due to potential Ultrafast/Giga market share. Invariably these locations left without FTTP are likely to be the same ADSL and slower FTTC areas.