CityFibre To Invest £30m In Peterborough Gigabit Fibre Network

Peterborough City Council and CityFibre have agreed a deal to bring a fibre network capable of delivering speeds of up to 1Gbps to homes, businesses and public sector organisations.

CityFibre, which aims to make smaller UK towns and cities ‘gigabit’ cities, has already deployed networks in York and Bournemouth and said it was attracted to Peterborough because of its business growth and “forward thinking local authority.”

It noted that 1,400 SMBs launched in the city last year and added that the same model has been deployed in Europe, the US and Asia, delivering returns and providing a range of social and economic benefits to local communities.

CityFibre Peterborough

The firm will invest as much as £30 million into the project, which will see 90km of fibre deployed in the city, which will then be leased out to ISPs and mobile operators which require backhaul links for their 4G services.

Rollout will commence next spring, with the first stage covering major streets and providing access to 4,000 businesses. The second stage will cover an additional 60,000 homes and businesses and offer speeds up to 40 times faster than previously available.

“Fibre broadband is widely viewed as the utility of the future and pure fibre networks, such as the one we are deploying in Peterborough, are the only future-proofed solution,” said Greg Mesch, chief executive officer at CityFibre. “Networks such as this are the foundation of our Gigabit city vision. There are over 100 towns and cities in the UK that currently do not have ultra-high speed connectivity, so the opportunity for CityFibre to play a part in modernising the UK’s digital infrastructure is extremely exciting.”

The government has already allocated £530 million for the rollout of fibre in the UK as part of the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme – and controversially, BT has won all the contracts so far.  The government has also earmarked another £250 million to deliver superfast broadband to areas not covered by the BDUK deployment.

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