Over in the north of England, a new alternative FTTH project is taking shape. Two alternative broadband and content providers and one metro fiber builder and operator have teamed up to form a joint venture. The target is the city of York, and the goal is 1Gbps to homes and businesses.
CityFibre, Sky, and TalkTalk will each own a third of the new company, which will take on BT and the OpenReach infrastructure. CityFibre’s contribution, as you might imagine, is its existing metro fiber network in York. Sky and TalkTalk will, I assume, be contributing capital for the buildout, and will become wholesale fiber customers once the network is in place. They will be using gear from Fujitsu to construct a new, hopefully economical network design.
If you think this sounds a bit like Google in Kansas City but without the Google part, I’m sure York hopes you are right. They hope to have the first customers hooked up sometime in 2015, and are already evaluating candidates for two additional markets. All they need now is, well, a name…
I wonder if this model of an aggressive metro fiber operator and one or more competitive ISPs team up to take on the incumbent might also be possible on this side of the Atlantic. Or are we just going to wait for Google Fiber to do all the work for us?
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Categories: FTTH · Metro fiber
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Send $500/sub my way and I’ll do the same here! 😉
I keep forgetting to give CrowdFiber a try. I’ve got about 1k homes without cable access I want to push FTTH into.