Posted: 21st Jun, 2011 By: MarkJ

CityFibre Holdings, which recently restarted work to "
stabilise and repair" the unfinished 1Gbps
Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) broadband ISP network in
Bournemouth (UK) (acquired from the i3 Group in January 2011), has shrugged off the threat from BT Group's new plan to deploy its own fibre optic based services into the town.
BT revealed last week (
here) that the South Coast town had indeed been included into its latest superfast broadband roll-out, with the
upgrade being scheduled to begin during 2012. By contrast CityFibre intends to start building its new infrastructure over the same period and aims to pass all of Bournemouth's homes by mid-2013.
Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre Holdings, said (Bournemouth Echo):"The network we are building in Bournemouth is a true fibre to the home network. All our fibres will terminate inside people’s homes and offices, with no copper drop.
Copper running into the home, as used in fibre to the cabinet builds, while cheaper to roll-out, hampers the brute strength, ultra-fast speeds and future-proofed qualities of a true fibre to the home network.
Our network, already over 20,000 homes strong and the largest in the UK, will be ready for services by the end of the year. We have shovels in the ground and intend to complete the Bournemouth network to some 60,000 homes by mid-2013."
It's important to note that Mesch's reaction concentrates almost entirely upon BT's slower 'up to' 40Mbps
Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) technology. However, BT Openreach also intends to bring its full fibre optic
Fibre-to-the-Premises ( FTTP ) solution to the town, which could potentially match CityFibre's service.
Crucially BT has not said what proportion of Bournemouth can expect to receive its FTTP solution, although the figure is likely to be fairly low because such networks are costly and complicated to deploy. FTTC will almost certainly dominate BT's solution in Bournemouth.
On top of that Virgin Media recently confirmed that Bournemouth's cable ( Cable Modem ) network will soon (autumn) be upgraded to support its latest service speeds of up to 100Mbps. Bad news for CityFibre but good news for consumer choice.