Customers of several Fibrecity (City Fibre Holdings) supporting broadband ISPs in the English (UK) South Coast city of Bournemouth, which includes Velocity1 and Fibreband, have now been without access to their super-fast 100Mbps Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) internet access services since the end of February 2011.

The i3 Group formally sold off its UK subsidiaries (shares), which included its local Fibrecity project, H2O Networks, Opencity Media and Wireless Network Systems, to a consortium led by Greg Mesch, i3's own former President and COO, in January 2011 (here).

The move followed a controversial investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into Total Asset Finance (TAF) last year, which had been funding most of the project (here). As money dried up the project ground to a halt and has so far been unable to recover, leaving much of the development in Bournemouth unfinished.

It's understood that customers in the city were informed at the end of February 2011 that their services would be suspended, although some had already been suffering from lengthy outages even before the notice was issued. At least one ISP, Velocity1, is known to have offered a refund on February's payment and given customers the ability to leave their contract without charge.

A further update was then issued around the middle of March 2011, in which affected customers were told that the service was "not expected to be available" for an unspecified period of time. As a result many of City Fibre Holdings customers have chosen not to wait around and instead begun switching over to a rival service from Virgin Media UK.

So far there have been no further updates and the future of City Fibre Holdings is now looking increasingly bleak.