CityFibre expands strategic alliance with Bechtel to support continued acceleration of its rollout

LONDON, Sept. 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CityFibre, the UK's largest alternative provider of wholesale fibre infrastructure, has significantly extended and expanded its partnership with Bechtel, one of the world's leading engineering, construction, and project management companies, to support the continued acceleration of its rollout to approximately one third of the UK market by 2025.

Bechtel's teams have been fully integrated into CityFibre's organizational structure since September 2020, enabling CityFibre to accelerate the mobilization of its 25 network construction partners and manage more than 60 parallel full town and city builds. Bechtel has also helped to strengthen project controls to enhance operational management, establish controls around risk and change, and increase productivity.

The new agreement formalizes a five-year extension to the partnership and will fully leverage Bechtel's mega-project expertise in project controls, construction management, contracts management, and environment, safety and health. Bechtel will focus its leadership and construction management efforts in CityFibre's north and southeast regions, areas with the greatest density of parallel builds. It will also continue to provide functional support across all regions as well as developing resource models to ensure thousands more operatives are trained and available to build partners to help construct the network.

The alliance will help ensure CityFibre's rollout continues to scale at pace, in line with its plans, while also ensuring unrivalled quality of network construction. By the end of 2022, CityFibre expects to have more than 150 parallel full city, town and village builds underway. By the end of 2025 the rollout will reach approximately 285 locations and address up to 8m homes.

Bechtel's scalable resourcing capabilities will also support CityFibre's potential participation in Building Digital UK's 'Project Gigabit' programme to bring Full Fibre to rural areas across the UK.

"It's a pleasure to be extending our alliance with Bechtel after a hugely successful year as partners," Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre said. "Over the last twelve months, they have worked in lockstep with our teams to deliver an extraordinary acceleration of our rollout. This pace will only increase as we commence new projects and maximise the productivity of each build. We're delighted that Bechtel, with their unparalleled experience of complex, scaled construction projects, will be working alongside us in the years ahead as we continue to build the UK's finest Full Fibre infrastructure platform."

"We're really proud of what we have achieved with CityFibre in only a year," John Williams, Bechtel's UK & Ireland Infrastructure Managing Director said. "This new alliance will deepen our partnership, help sustain CityFibre's incredible growth trajectory, and help future-proof the nation's digital infrastructure for communities across the UK."

Notes:

Capital raise

• CityFibre has recently concluded the UK's largest ever capital raise for Full Fibre deployment of £1.125bn.
• The investment round has been secured new investors Mubadala and Interogo Holding.

Operational Progress

• CityFibre has appointed 25 network construction partners across the UK.
• Network build is underway in 60 UK cities and towns.
• CityFibre's services are now live in 46 cities and towns.

Network

• CityFibre is the only UK digital infrastructure business designing, building and operating a national wholesale network that is 100% Full Fibre.
• The network supports symmetrical gigabit speeds, enabling users to upload as fast as they can download.
• The networks are based on future-proofed PON technology meaning that they can be easily upgraded to 10, 50 or even 100Gbps (Gigabits per second) and beyond without any changes to the underlying network infrastructure.
• Brand new network infrastructure unencumbered by legacy systems enables CityFibre to deliver industry-leading Right First Time customer installation scores of over 95%.

About Bechtel:
Bechtel is a trusted engineering, construction and project management partner to industry and government. Differentiated by the quality of our people and our relentless drive to deliver the most successful outcomes, we align our capabilities to our customers' objectives to create a lasting positive impact. Since 1898, we have helped customers complete more than 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents that have created jobs, grown economies, improved the resiliency of the world's infrastructure, increased access to energy, resources, and vital services, and made the world a safer, cleaner place.

Bechtel serves the Energy; Infrastructure; Nuclear, Security & Environmental; and Mining & Metals markets. Our services span from initial planning and investment, through start-up and operations. www.bechtel.com  

About CityFibre:
CityFibre is the UK's largest independent Full Fibre infrastructure platform. We provide digital infrastructure that enables our wholesale customers to provide ultra-fast, reliable and futureproof broadband, ethernet and 5G services to homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, GPs surgeries and anything else that needs connecting.

We have a £4bn Full Fibre network rollout programme underway which is on track to serve up to a third of the UK by 2025; that's 8m homes, 800k businesses, 400k local authority sites and 250k 5G access points. We've already announced 285 cities, towns and villages which will receive a transformational digital upgrade as part of our nationwide rollout.

As the nation's only 100% Full Fibre wholesale network, CityFibre is trusted by major Internet Service Providers and mobile operators including TalkTalk, Three, Vodafone and Zen as we are actively supporting a new generation of smaller regional ISPs dedicated to delivering Full Fibre Broadband.

CityFibre is based in London and is owned by Antin Infrastructure Partners, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mubadala Investment Company and Interogo Holding.

Media contact:  
James Ryan
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +44 020 7554 1600

SOURCE Bechtel