BT’s Former Chief UK Network Architect Becomes CityFibre’s New CTIO
Network operator CityFibre, which have so far expanded their 10Gbps capable FTTP broadband network to cover 4.6 million UK premises (4.3m RFS) and connected 730,000 customers, has today announced that BT Group’s former Chief Architect, Neil McRae, has been appointed to be the company’s new Chief Technology & Information Officer (CTIO).
The operator has yet to put out an official press release on the development, although Telecom TV appears to have picked up on it via an internal staff notice – issued yesterday. The appointment is quite a big one for CityFibre as, aside from his obvious experience, few people know as much about the inner workings of BT’s rival network, infrastructure, digital IT and processes than McRae.
McRae is currently the Chief Network Strategist (CNS) at Juniper Networks and is expected to join CityFibre sometime in the New Year. The move also means that CityFibre’s current CTIO, John Franklin (he’s been at the operator for more than 12 years), will be moved to take on a new role as the company’s Chief Integration Officer (CIO).
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The announcement comes shortly after the operator secured a crucial £2.3bn funding agreement (here), which was later followed by CityFibre changing CEO from Greg Mesch to former Goldman Sachs banker Simon Holden (here). Big developments like this often produce changes in company leadership and strategy.
McRae is certainly likely to have plenty of work when he arrives, with CityFibre currently known to be lining up several further acquisitions in the UK’s alternative broadband network space and planning future network enhancements. Some recent talks have also involved one of the market’s other major altnets, Netomnia (here), although no official agreements have been reached.. yet.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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In a world of grey C-level execs be a Neil. This is a real coup for CityFibre – Neil is easily one of the world’s top 5 thinkers, leaders and doers in this space.
I bet he’s routed a few packets in his time
Feels like a good move for CityFibre. Neil’s got hands-on experience with national-scale networks and tends to focus on practical delivery, rather than just another exec.
BT is poop and has always been behind the curve, I don’t see how a upper tier BT employee is going to help cityfibre, BY sucked on almost everything they have done for the last 30 years.
A spectacularly childish and ill-informed comment. Neil is one of very best in the world at what he does and BT’s core global IP network, in the UK and globally, is one of the most capable to be found anywhere.
Do you think Juniper should have consulted with you before employing him? Did they make a mistake too?
If I and my employers had the budget to afford him he would be top of my list of people I would ask headhunters to go after and bait the line and spread the net for.
Neil is – as he will doubtless freely admit – a bit of an acquired taste at times – but he knows his stuff – and I am grateful to him that whilst he worked for BT when I had an issue which impacted our mutual customers, but which he could just have ignored given we’re tiny, instead got me in contact with people and got BT sending out replacement routers to the customers who had issues using our services because of a problem in the BT router hardware for which no software fix was possible.
Given the relative sizes of our orgs that he was fast and effective at making that happen is often in my experience a good sign of someone worth having on your team… so CityFibre are doubtless making a win here.