CityFibre set out earlier in 2012 to be able to offer FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) to 95% of businesses in York by the end of 2014, and the local press has an update detailing the launch which will see the core network made available to businesses.
Fibre rings in themselves are not new, they link most of the large cities in the UK, but these usually only offer one or two points of presence in each city where companies can connect to the fibre services, leaving them having to pay for expensive dedicated links that may be several kilometres long. It seems CityFibre Holdings is working to push its ring as close as possible to businesses to reduce the cost of the final connection.
The network was originally constructed to link 110 council sites across the city, but the interesting statistic is that by March 2013, the fibre network should be within 200m of 80% of the businesses in the city. It is not clear if this 200m from a point at which they can actually connect, or just the ducting passes within 200m.
York is in the running for a share of the £50m allocated to the smaller cities of the UK, with the lucky ten being announced in the Autumn statement. Though with around 60% of the city already having access to the 100 Mbps and 120 Mbps services from Virgin Media, and Openreach FTTC services available to large parts of the city there is already a big range of choice for businesses and consumers. FTTC Etherway offers businesses a path to lower priced but more business like contention ratios compared to traditional Ethernet/fibre services and once Openreach launches Fibre on Demand in 2013 the competition will get intense for the business pound.
staff member)
6 months ago
Sounds a bit like Peter Cochrane saying everyone is within a mile of dark fibre (which isn't even true). Unless there's a retail service proposition and a means to intercept and splice fibre connections it's just PR puff.