River City Networks Look to Build Fibre Broadband in UK Cities

A relatively new Liverpool-based alternative network operator called River City Networks, which was incorporated on 30th May 2023 and has one Director (Matthew Wilson), has revealed that it plans to deploy a new “gigabit dual fibre and wireless” network to serve premises in several UK cities, specifically in Liverpool, Manchester and London.

In order to do this, the operator is first seeking Code Powers from Ofcom, which are typically sought to help speed-up deployments of new fibre networks and cut costs, not least by reducing the number of licences needed for street works. The powers can also help with supporting access to run new fibre via Openreach’s (BT) existing cable ducts and poles (PIA).

The application itself doesn’t reveal much, but it does state that their “primary focus” is to provide customers with “gigabit dual fibre and wireless internet access to residential homes, offices, and business estates“. The company added that its “network will operate in data centres and core network cites across the UK, specifically in Liverpool, Manchester and London.”

As usual, there’s also some talk about providing businesses and consumers with connectivity in both “rural and urban locations“, with a particular focus on “hard-to-reach” areas that currently have “poor or non-existent gigabit connections“. But otherwise, there’s not a lot of detail to go off, and we couldn’t immediately find whether the company had setup a website (quite a few businesses have the same name).

Hopefully more details will emerge in the future.

UPDATE 1:12pm

This appears to be the same Matt Wilson that is responsible for business network provider Baltic Broadband and IX Liverpool, amongst many other things. Suffice to say, this gives the relatively new company a lot more credibility.