LONDON & YORK -- CityFibre Infrastructure Holdings Plc (AIM: CFHL), a leading designer, builder, owner and operator of fibre optic infrastructure, today announces that the Joint Venture with Sky and TalkTalk to build a city-wide, pure fibre-to-the-premises network in the City of York, has successfully completed the first phase of its construction.

This first phase has focused on enabling the Joint Venture partners to validate key network design principles, engineering processes and deployment economics. Based on the encouraging results and progress of this first phase, the Joint Venture has now approved the next phase of deployment, which will accelerate and increase the scale, bringing gigabit speed connectivity to thousands more properties in York.

The project will continue to develop and test the optimal FTTP deployment methods and the ability to scale roll-outs in order to create a state of the art pure fibre network fully independent of BT Openreach’s infrastructure. The network will be deployed and tested in preparation for the launch of services by Sky and TalkTalk later in the year.

Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre said; “We are really pleased with what we have accomplished so far. As a team, Sky, TalkTalk and CityFibre have validated a network design for true ultra-fast Fibre to the Home (FTTH) for residents and Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) for business users. This next phase will accelerate the deployment and will further help to determine the scalability of the infrastructure. Without the bottlenecks that exist in traditional networks, an ultra-fast fibre infrastructure will future-proof a city, offering superior quality of service and higher speeds as demand for bandwidth increases.”

CityFibre