The UK’s smaller cities are to get a £50million investment in gigabit fibre-optic broadband from CityFibre and Fujitsu.
The new infrastructure will allow ISPs to offer fibre-to-the-home services without using BT’s services.
CityFibre and Fujitsu haven’t announced where they will be building the new networks, but ‘second-tier cities’ usually refer to locations like Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford and Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham.
Greg Mesch, CityFibre’s CEO commented: “We are delighted to be working with Fujitsu. It is invaluable to have an outsourcing partner of such reputation working with us in our roll-out of transformational fibre infrastructure to over one million UK homes and over 50,000 businesses throughout the UK’s second tier cities.
“Fujitsu’s credentials in network deployment could not be stronger and few companies have as much knowledge of UK telecoms infrastructure.
“They are uniquely positioned to assist CityFibre in meeting our ambitious objectives across the entire fibre infrastructure spectrum, from mobile backhaul to metro networks and fibre-to-the premises.”
City Fibre and Fujitsu have already worked together on a 103km fibre ring network around York, which is the backbone for a fibre-to-the-premises network. The aim is to have 95 per cent of all its businesses having access to minimum connection speeds of 25 megabits per second by the end of 2014.
CityFibre already manages more than 100 private fibre projects and seven separate metropolitan fibre rings, including the UK’s largest fibre-to-the-home network in Bournemouth, covering 24,000 homes.
Andy Stevenson, chief executive officer, Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe added: “This project takes advantage of all Fujitsu’s core competencies including planning, building and operating next generation access networks across the world.”
Image: dsearls/Flickr
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