York's superfast fibre optic broadband network project wins prestigious NextGen 12 award

Oct. 23, 2012 - PRLog -- CityFibre is pleased to announce it has won the NextGen 12 Award for Collaborative Advantage for its project in partnership with City of York Council.

Integrating York’s separate administration, library and education networks onto a metro-fibre network, has transformed its service delivery model and reduced its cost base. It has also created the backbone for a city-wide, fibre-to-the-premises network, for homes and businesses.

This partnership represents the essence of CityFibre’s vision for towns and cities throughout the UK to have a future-proofed pure fibre backbone at their core, allowing them to satisfy the demand for superfast broadband at every level within it - homes, businesses, visitors and such.

York’s Leader of the Council James Alexander said: “Key to York’s ongoing success is its accessibility and connectivity. We are progressing initiatives and investing in key projects with public and private sector partners to ensure York is at the heart of business in the UK and abroad. This network, built in partnership with CityFibre, provides a platform for sustainable growth, ensuring our businesses have a competitive advantage and boosting the city’s position as an attractive proposition for inward investment. With fibre-to-the-home as the inevitable extension of this unique model of a public and private partnership, it will bring transformational benefits to almost every aspect of our city.”

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre added “York’s metro fibre network is already benefiting numerous stakeholders in the city and there are a host of new applications and reasons to extend its reach and usage. It provides York with a future-proof digital infrastructure capable of supporting all the elements of a modern city now and in the years to come.”

York is benefiting from gigabit connectivity between 110 sites including council offices, its accommodation estate, community and neighbourhood services locations, explore centres and libraries. With free public WiFi within these sites, York is bucking the trend with libraries becoming more utilised than less, and the city-centre public WiFi trial has proved so popular that it notched up over a million hits within a few months.

Students across the city are enjoying gigabit connections to their schools and colleges making them some of the best connected in the UK; and York’s district hospital is now benefitting from secure, high-speed communication of patient data between its sites.

York’s metro fibre connectivity will soon bear fruit for the city’s business community too, with the vast majority within easy reach of the network. The benefits of pure fibre such as gigabit speeds, huge upload capacity and ultra-low latency will give York’s businesses a head start and make the city even more popular, attracting new business and commerce into the area.

With a clear opportunity to continue to leverage the network by connecting the city’s mobile phone masts, York’s fibre core is only beginning to demonstrate its potential. When fibre-to-the-home to the city’s 100,000 homes has been deployed, York will truly have cemented its reputation as the digital infrastructure capital of the North.

ENDS

Media contact:

Deborah Simcock
Good Relations Group
M. 07810 834548
e. cityfibre@Insightmkt.com


About CityFibre

CityFibre (www.cityfibre.com) is one of the UK’s leading fibre optic infrastructure providers. By building dedicated fibre optic networks for the public and private sectors, we empower data-hungry users throughout the country, by unleashing unlimited speeds on future-proofed technology.

Our transformational fibre infrastructure projects comprise point-to-point connections, metro rings and Fibre-to-the-Premises networks that make possible Next Generation Access and gigabit level services direct to local authorities, businesses and homes.

CityFibre manages over 100 private fibre projects and seven separate metropolitan fibre rings under long-term contracts with local authorities, police forces, healthcare organisations and universities. With almost 30,000km of fibre in the ground, connecting more than 350 sites and data centres across the UK, we are the country’s largest independent provider of fibre in secondary cities.

In Bournemouth, CityFibre owns the largest FTTH project in the UK. With over 21,000 homes in marketing now, the network enables service providers to deliver unprecedented superfast broadband with speeds of up to one gigabit per second.

About the NextGen 12 Awards

The NextGen Challenge Awards showcase the best in next generation digital access infrastructure innovation and run alongside the annual NextGen Conference - the UK's leading event for Next Generation broadband activity.

Designed to give companies the opportunity to highlight achievements in developing and deploying better broadband, the awards have proved popular since their launch in 2011.

The 2012 version had more categories and reflected the wider impacts of digital infrastructure investment across the whole economy. The independent judging panel were Chi Onwurah MP, Dr Peter Cochrane and David Harrington - Head Regulatory Affairs CMA. The awards evening was hosted by Chi Onwurah MP with speeches by Lords Errol and Inglewood.

ENTRIES WERE INVITED FOR THE FOLLOWING CATEGORIES

1. Innovative funding solutions - examples of achievement in assembling the financial resources to deploy advanced digital access networks 2. Rural leadership and community development - examples of individuals or teams working to bring communities together to deliver local access network projects in ‘hard-to-reach’ areas.
3. Urban Network Enterprise - examples from larger communities and developments where the quality of network access is a significant factor in local economic growth.
4. Collaborative Advantage - an award for exceptional endeavour in developing multi-party public/private collaboration to plan and/or deliver locally sustainable FTTH deployments.