CityFibre Links Dundee’s Waterfront Project

LONDON, September 8, 2011 -

CityFibre has finished building a dark fibre optic link which is part of a £270m reinvigoration of Dundee. This vital fibre network has linked Dundee City Council’s new headquarters to a second datacentre, which supports more than 200 premises across Dundee including schools and social housing.

The new high bandwidth network will also allow Dundee City Council to make significant cost savings in terms of telecommunications expenditure as well as enabling it to downsize premises. The Council’s new headquarters now accommodates around 600 desks with a ratio of 10 staff to every eight desks. This deficit of desks has been possible as the new network has allowed the Council to introduce hotdesking and flexible working.

Ged Bell, head of IT at Dundee City Council said: “This was a flagship project for us; it was a vital part in the whole Waterfront development. CityFibre’s dark fibre technology provided us with exactly the capacity requirements that we needed. Their costing strategy and willingness to work with us were also big contributory factors in or decision to select them as a partner. There was no-one else that could meet our needs in terms of the capacity and at a price we could afford.”  

The Council’s new HQ would have needed to be 25% larger just to accommodate desks for all its staff which would have meant significant and unnecessary cost implications. As property and people are the biggest costs for any Council, having the flexibility to take a strategic approach to estate management means it has a great opportunity to make measurable cost savings at a time when the economy needs it most.

Mark Collins, Chief Commercial Officer, CityFibre Holdings said: “Our solutions align perfectly with many local authorities spend to save initiatives. Customers are not forced to endlessly ‘rent’ more and more costly bandwidth; instead a dedicated point to point fibre network demonstrates real value and significant cost savings over a flexible term contract. What is more our networks can easily handle even the most extreme bandwidth requirements and if additional fibre pairs are required, these can be purchased at a vastly reduced cost.”

The contract was originally signed in October 2010 based upon a ten year agreement with no capital investment or connection charge for the Council. During January 2011, the Council altered its initial specification to include the installation of an additional eight fibre pairs, four on each route.

About CityFibre Holding

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

Our projects comprise point-to-point connections, metro rings that connect multiple sites in a town or city in a fibre ‘ring’ and Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks that make possible Next Generation Access and gigabit level services direct to people’s homes.

CityFibre manages over 100 private fibre projects under long-term contracts with local authorities, police forces, healthcare organisations and universities, connecting more than 350 sites and data centres across the UK.

We also operate seven separate metropolitan fibre rings such as the one recently completed in the City of York. These extensive fibre networks cover a total population exceeding 2,000,000 people and over 57,000 businesses. With almost 30,000 Km of fibre in the ground we are the UK’s largest independent provider of fibre in secondary cities.

In Bournemouth, CityFibre owns the largest FTTH project in the UK. With over 24,000 homes ready for service by 2012, the network enables service providers to deliver unprecedented superfast broadband with speeds of up to 1Gbps.

For more information, please visit www.cityfibreholdings.com  

Media contact: Deborah Leah, Bell Pottinger, M. +44(0)7810 834548, e. dleah at insightmkt.com