CityFibre Talk 1Gb FTTP Rollout with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk
Posted Monday, June 9th, 2014 (1:25 am) by Mark Jackson (Score 1,247)
The Director of Strategy and Policy at urban fibre optic developer CityFibre, Mark Collins, has today revealed more to ISPreview.co.uk about their Joint Venture plans with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk to roll-out an “ultra-fast” 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) broadband network for UK homes in three cities, starting with York.
The past year has been very busy for CityFibre, which has announced plans to deploy its fibre optic infrastructure into several new cities across the United Kingdom and recently raised millions in additional investment funding by floating onto the London Stock Exchange (here).
At present CityFibre has already built its own primary fibre optic networks in Bournemouth and York (here), while they recently announced similar deployments in Peterborough (here) and Coventry (here). The operator also manages a variety of other networks and are busy considering future roll-out plans for a number of additional large towns and cities, such as Bath (here).
Until recently most of CityFibre’s fibre optic deployments, except its service in Bournemouth which was originally constructed by the i3 Group UK, have predominantly focused upon serving the public sector and businesses. But all that changed in April 2014 when CityFibre announced a bold new Joint Venture with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk (here), which would adapt the operators network in York to deliver a 1Gbps fibre optic broadband service to thousands of homes across the city, before potentially expanding into two additional cities.
A new company will be created to support the new service, which will make use of and extend CityFibre’s existing 103km long FTTP network in the city, and the first customers are then expected to go live in 2015. The long-term plan is to make the new service available city-wide, although initially the roll-out will only focus upon 20,000 homes (representing about a quarter of the city) and is being supported by an investment of £5m each from the two ISPs.
But the new network faces many challenges, not least with the difficulty of attracting customers in a market where rival superfast broadband services from operators like BT (FTTC) and Virgin Media (Cable DOCSIS / FTTN) are already available. Questions have also been raised over the economic viability of the plan, with TalkTalk controversially suggesting that it might technically be cheaper to roll-out FTTP than hybrid-fibre FTTC. Suffice to say that ISPreview.co.uk were keen to learn more about the development and managed to put our questions to CityFibre’s Mark Collins.
The Interview
Q1. TalkTalk recently said that the economics of the joint approach to FTTP in York could prove highly attractive, with a combination of scale and low cost build technology delivering a “significantly lower cost per home passed” than for the current FTTC infrastructure.
Meanwhile the reasons BT are deploying FTTC is because they can reach tens of millions of homes and businesses for comparatively low cost, largely because they don’t need to re-build or replace the costly “last mile” connection from cabinets and into homes.
Naturally there are ways to cut the cost of deploying FTTP, such as via micro-trenching (we note that the FTTP roll-out will use this) and using telegraph poles, but it would surely take a lot more than just those to make rolling out FTTP cheaper than FTTC; especially as you’d still need to keep the old copper network running at the same time in order to support legacy users. Can you clarify where the other cost savings areas are?
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/06/...-york.html
Posted Monday, June 9th, 2014 (1:25 am) by Mark Jackson (Score 1,247)
The Director of Strategy and Policy at urban fibre optic developer CityFibre, Mark Collins, has today revealed more to ISPreview.co.uk about their Joint Venture plans with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk to roll-out an “ultra-fast” 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) broadband network for UK homes in three cities, starting with York.
The past year has been very busy for CityFibre, which has announced plans to deploy its fibre optic infrastructure into several new cities across the United Kingdom and recently raised millions in additional investment funding by floating onto the London Stock Exchange (here).
At present CityFibre has already built its own primary fibre optic networks in Bournemouth and York (here), while they recently announced similar deployments in Peterborough (here) and Coventry (here). The operator also manages a variety of other networks and are busy considering future roll-out plans for a number of additional large towns and cities, such as Bath (here).
Until recently most of CityFibre’s fibre optic deployments, except its service in Bournemouth which was originally constructed by the i3 Group UK, have predominantly focused upon serving the public sector and businesses. But all that changed in April 2014 when CityFibre announced a bold new Joint Venture with Sky Broadband and TalkTalk (here), which would adapt the operators network in York to deliver a 1Gbps fibre optic broadband service to thousands of homes across the city, before potentially expanding into two additional cities.
A new company will be created to support the new service, which will make use of and extend CityFibre’s existing 103km long FTTP network in the city, and the first customers are then expected to go live in 2015. The long-term plan is to make the new service available city-wide, although initially the roll-out will only focus upon 20,000 homes (representing about a quarter of the city) and is being supported by an investment of £5m each from the two ISPs.
But the new network faces many challenges, not least with the difficulty of attracting customers in a market where rival superfast broadband services from operators like BT (FTTC) and Virgin Media (Cable DOCSIS / FTTN) are already available. Questions have also been raised over the economic viability of the plan, with TalkTalk controversially suggesting that it might technically be cheaper to roll-out FTTP than hybrid-fibre FTTC. Suffice to say that ISPreview.co.uk were keen to learn more about the development and managed to put our questions to CityFibre’s Mark Collins.
The Interview
Q1. TalkTalk recently said that the economics of the joint approach to FTTP in York could prove highly attractive, with a combination of scale and low cost build technology delivering a “significantly lower cost per home passed” than for the current FTTC infrastructure.
Meanwhile the reasons BT are deploying FTTC is because they can reach tens of millions of homes and businesses for comparatively low cost, largely because they don’t need to re-build or replace the costly “last mile” connection from cabinets and into homes.
Naturally there are ways to cut the cost of deploying FTTP, such as via micro-trenching (we note that the FTTP roll-out will use this) and using telegraph poles, but it would surely take a lot more than just those to make rolling out FTTP cheaper than FTTC; especially as you’d still need to keep the old copper network running at the same time in order to support legacy users. Can you clarify where the other cost savings areas are?
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/06/...-york.html
