CityFibre Holdings (CFH) have secured investment from Citigroup to help it fund the company's plans to build metro based fibre infrastructure in UK cities. Back in November, CFH announced that they had partnered with Macquarie Capital to help the company raise £500 million of capital to help it expand operations, and it said it intended to connect one million home and 50,000 businesses up with fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology.
"We are pleased to offer CityFibre this facility as we believe that CityFibre is well-placed to develop its alternative fibre infrastructure offering to serve UK homes and businesses. We look forward to working with CityFibre in its future development."
Michael Lavelle, (Head of EMEA Capital Markets), Citi
CFH intend to focus this investment on metro fibre networks in "second tier cities", and will operate them in an open-access wholesale model. This could be particularly useful where counties are looking to deploy fibre to homes/businesses which currently lack access to super-fast broadband as a fibre network will be required to connect up the last-mile access part of the network. By deploying at the metro level, the company will be able to enable end user connections to be made in future, and will operate a network which will also appeal to businesses.
"I am delighted to announce the provision of a facility by such a prestigious financial institution as Citi. They understand the vital role of fibre infrastructure and recognise the unprecedented business opportunity afforded by acute underinvestment in the UK. CityFibre is perfectly poised to take full advantage of this unmet demand and looks forward to working with Citi to realise our vision".
Greg Mesch, (CEO) CityFibre Holding
Still nothing in Bournemouth bar a tiny amount of free signups, probably the same amount of properties as before it all went bang.
A very good company at getting the headlines without actually doing anything.