Record month for BT rival fibre optics network

DESIGNER and builder of fibre optic infrastructure, CityFibre, has had a record month for new sales in June for its flagship York CORE.

The company signed contracts covering 70 new connections during the month, for a total contract value of £527,000.

The latest additions to the network take the total contract value added to the York project to £3.4m, an increase of 79% over the initial anchor contract.

Sky and TalkTalk joined up with CityFibre to trial this fibre optic service in competition with market giant BT, initially connecting 20,000 homes in York to a service more than 50 times the national average, at 1 gigabit per second.

Chief executive of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, said that their service could be expanded to up to 10m homes within a decade.

Contracts cover a diverse range of sites, including public safety such as school security and traffic enforcement CCTV, business and data centre connectivity, and landmark public sector amenities such as the York Theatre Royal and the York Eco Business Centre.

Last month CityFibre launched its service in Hull after teaming up with MS3 which controls cables used by business customers, after successfully partnering with EE and Three last year to increase 4G coverage in the area.

Greg Mesch, chief executive of CityFibre, said: “These latest sales figures from York are a great validation of the ongoing demand for fibre connectivity to every conceivable category of end user under our Gigabit City model.

“We started out under the York anchor contract with just 105 connected sites, and this latest set of connections will take us to 348 across the city, or roughly three connections per kilometer of network.

“This is well ahead of international benchmarks and underlines the strength of our shared infrastructure model. Moreover, the financial metrics of new business remain strong, in line with our long-term strategy of delivering high returns on incremental capital deployed.”