CityFibre UK Scoops FTTH Council Europe’s Operator Award

The FTTH Council Europe, which is currently holding its annual conference in Vienna (Austria) this week, has today announced the winners of three awards that reflect those who have made “outstanding contributions” to the acceleration of FTTP/B deployment in Europe. One of the headline ‘Operator Award‘ winners was CityFibre.

By now our readers will be aware that CityFibre are investing £4bn to build a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, which has so far enabled their full fibre network to cover 1.5 million UK premises – with 1.3m Ready For Service (RFS) via a supporting ISPs (here). The main aim of this build is to cover “up to” 8 million premises – across around 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) – by the end of 2025 (here).

CityFibre’s programme is one of many alternative network deployments currently taking place in the UK, but they’re also one of the most significant. The operator is thus often credited with helping to raise the competitive stakes for established players (e.g. Openreach, Virgin Media) and thus motivate the wider industry to take full fibre deployments more seriously.

Suffice to say that we’re not at all surprised to see CityFibre’s CEO, Greg Mesch, pick up the council’s “Operator Award” today. Meanwhile, the “Individual Award” was presented to Jacek Wiśniewski, CEO of NEXERA, while Alex Goldblum, CEO of Eurofiber, has been chosen as the winner of the “Charles Kao Award“.

Eric Festraets, President of the FTTH Council Europe, said:

“Despite the challenging context of the past couple years, the fibre industry has continued to grow and thrive. With fibre connectivity being at the heart of the twin digital and green transition, the ambitious roll-out programmes backed by public and private investments offer great opportunities for the industry. Yet we continue to face many challenges that we need to overcome to keep up the fibre deployment and take-up.”

End.