The Bournemouth Borough Council has told ISPreview.co.uk that it still doesn't know when CityFibre Holdings (Fibrecity) will be returning to the South Coast city in order to finish their controversial super-fast 100Mbps Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) broadband ISP network.

The i3 Group sold off its UK subsidiaries (shares), which included Fibrecity, 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). This followed a Series Fraud Office (SFO) investigation of the original projects financial backers (here). Meanwhile the work in Bournemouth has been left unfinished and a number of services were recently suspended (here).


However, two weeks ago CityFibre Holdings emerged from their restructuring exercise and promptly pledged to "start making good the works left unfinished by our predecessors in Bournemouth" (here). The new group promised to repair the network, add ISPs and begin activating customers.

The press release was designed to show that, as they told us only last week, "there is a future for the assets that have already been built". Sadly it lacked any kind of timetable and CityFibre's actual business strategy has yet to be revealed, which will apparently surface "as soon as it can".

Meanwhile Bournemouth is still waiting and many customers have since moved over to Virgin Media after their services came to an abrupt end. It's unclear how CityFibre can reverse this situation.


CityFibre recently claimed to have connected 10,000 homes in Bournemouth to its fibre optic broadband network, with a further 12,500 passed. Ironically that statement came shortly after their ISPs (e.g. Velocity1) had suspended the service.

Still, the group does claim to have a "highly experienced management team" and over 120 long-term contracts with local authorities such as police forces, healthcare organisations, councils and universities. It also inherits eight separate metropolitan fibre rings covering a total population of 2,084,000 people, over 57,000 businesses and more than 300 data centres.

It would be a wonderful achievement if CityFibre Holdings can get back on track but the task they face, while not insurmountable, is by no means an easy one. We hope to have more information soon.