CityFibre launches National Access product to enable partners across its nationwide footprint

• New product will accelerate the speed to market of ISPs across CityFibre’s expanding nationwide footprint.
• Interconnection of local network footprints represents a major investment of over £65m.

CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent Full Fibre platform, has launched a new National Access product, making it far easier, faster and more cost effective for its wholesale partners to offer market-leading Full Fibre services across its nationwide footprint.

The product is made possible thanks to a major investment by CityFibre in new network that brings together all its local access networks onto a multi-terabit nationwide backbone. The investment is estimated to exceed £65m over the next seven years and will deliver an expanded service proposition and improved customer experience for its partners.

With interconnection points at strategic locations across the country, partners will ultimately be able to market, sell and provide consumer and business FTTP services to any premises on CityFibre’s networks. Each new customer ordering a service from a partner will be offered an installation date within five working days of placing their order, providing them with rapid access to the huge speed and reliability benefits of Full Fibre.

The National Access product will significantly accelerate partners’ speed to market in locations as they come online. It will also mean that entering new markets will be considerably more cost effective for those partners not wishing to set-up local network infrastructure of their own, or invest in third party backhaul. This saving will enable partners to invest more capital in sales and marketing to maximise take-up.

CityFibre is fast becoming the wholesale fibre platform of choice with over 30 consumer ISPs selling market-leading, symmetrical Full Fibre broadband services. Only last week, CityFibre signed a major extension to its strategic partnership with Vodafone, which will see them make long-term volume commitments over its nationwide footprint, leveraging the National Access product.

The new product will utilise CityFibre’s state-of-the-art local access and national backbone networks with diverse entry routes and ring-based core network infrastructure. It will also support multiple services across residential, SME, larger corporate customer segments and 5G small cells, using CityFibre’s Passive Optical Network (PON) architecture within the same single shared network build.

John Franklin, Chief Technology Information Officer at CityFibre, said: “We’re committed to building a world-class digital infrastructure platform that’s simply ‘Better By Design’. We’re using infrastructure that is dependable, a platform that’s powerful and enabling a service experience for our partners that’s effortless and second to none. That’s why we are fast becoming the network of choice for ISPs. The launch of our National Access product is just one way we are delivering against that commitment. We are making it faster, easier and cheaper for partners to access our network nationwide, bringing Full Fibre broadband to millions of homes and businesses even faster.”