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| CityFibre Fundraising for 1M UK Homes |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Thursday, 03 November 2011 13:50 |
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First must raise $800M. Goldman and other bankers are looking hard for European infrastructure investments, encouraging both established companies and entrepreneurs to consider fiber builds. Greg Mesch’s (Esat, Versatel) CityFibre has now retained aggressive Australian bankers Macquarie to raise £500M to connect a million homes directly to fibre. They are already building FTTH in Bournemouth aswell as fibre rings in York and other cities.
The EU is planning ten billion for infrastructure building and Britain likely several billion more. Cable covers only half of Britain and BT’s FTTN/DSL/FTTH is only set for two-thirds. So one-third of the country has no good choice in sight and will be welcoming to a new high-speed build. CityFibre understands and is happy to work with governments who want open access systems, a major plus. Sky and TalkTalk each have substantial shares of the market while renting BT local loops. They - and Virgin Cable out of territory - are natural customers for any new network with the ability to take large numbers of lines from the beginning. That scale means a new build can reach breakeven and a return on investment much more quickly. Here’s the release.
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