Peterborough Council signs deal with Cityfibre to create 'Gigabit City'

Businesses and residents will get access to broadband download speeds of up to 1Gbps from summer 2014

Peterborough City Council has today signed a deal with fibre internet provider CityFibre to transform itself into a "Gigabit City".

The contract was signed today at a ceremony held at Peterborough Town Hall.

CityFibre had previously announced that it was to privately invest £30m into the city to create a fibre network.

Once the rollout is completed, the firm claims that businesses and residents of the city will be able to access internet connections with download speeds of up to 1Gbps.

The first services to go live will be in summer 2014, and the network should be completed by April 2015.

The fibre business broadband package of speeds ranging between 500Mbps and 1Gbps will cost between £50 and £100 per month, while the consumer fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband package will be £25 to £50 a month for the same speeds.

For business customers, Level 3 has been selected as the service provider, and CityFibre will work with other ISPs to offer packages to consumers.

At the event, CityFibre's director of policy and regulation, Mark Collins, told delegates that the company will first deploy 90km of fibre and that eventually this will grow to connect to "all things in the city", from CCTVs to GP practices.

He said that Peterborough is an attractive proposition as it is a developing city with 4,000 businesses, 90,000 employees and one of the fastest growing economies in the UK.

Collins added that the network would be future proof so that it could become a "Terabit City" at some point.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre told Computing that the company has tested 10Gbps and 100Gbps speeds and that it can continue to sub-duct its infrastructure to add 1,000 additional strands of fibre, which in turn will allow for increased speeds.

He said that businesses would be the first to benefit from the new network.

"The order [of those benefiting from fibre] will be businesses and the public sector, datacentres, mobile operators and then the plans have been designed so that it can be rolled out for consumers as well," Mesch said.

He thanked Peterborough's citizens in advance as CityFibre "is going to dig up a lot of roads", but reassured them that this was to benefit the city in the future.

Peterborough City Council's leader, Marco Cereste, welcomed the news, and said that he knew from his own personal experience how faster internet could benefit consumers and enterprises.

"At home I was paying for 8Mbps and getting 0.54Mbps, and at my business I get slower speeds than 1Mbps - and most of the time it is slower than that. Quite often it doesn't work at all - that's the entire estate, so it is affecting a lot of businesses," he told Computing.