CityFibre has completed the acquisition of all metropolitan local access duct and fibre network assets of IT managed services provider Redcentric.
The assets total at least 137km and the deal accelerates CityFibre’s recent growth still further as it now owns 40 major UK metro networks, becoming an increasingly powerful national competitor to BT Openreach.
Pursuant to its strategy of growing footprint through acquisition of non-incumbent owned fibre infrastructure assets, the deal provides CityFibre with significant metro networks in Cambridge, Portsmouth and Southampton, along with complementary incremental coverage in a number of existing city footprints including Nottingham, Derby and Northampton. It also saves CityFibre considerable time and millions of pounds in capex when compared to a self-build alternative.
Commitments
In the £5m network acquisition, CityFibre has secured £4.5m in long-term dark fibre leasing commitments from Redcentric who become a major new customer. Redcentric will continue to operate the fibre infrastructure to serve the connected customers.
CityFibre’s new network will continue to serve 188 Redcentric customer connections. As part of the transaction, Redcentric has also entered into a framework agreement with CityFibre for the use of CityFibre’s infrastructure across its national footprint in future. As with all its network assets, CityFibre will soon make the new footprint available to its wholesale partners comprising business ISPs, public sector service integrators, mobile operators and data centres amongst others.
The newly acquired networks, such as the 44km footprint throughout Cambridge, are all routed to address local areas of identified high demand for high bandwidth services.
Greg Mesch, Chief Executive Officer of CityFibre said: “We’re delighted with today’s acquisition of fibre network assets from Redcentric, which takes us to an important milestone of coverage of 40 cities. Once again we’ve shown that underutilised legacy fibre assets can find a new home in which to flourish within CityFibre’s wholesale shared infrastructure model. We’re very pleased to have secured a deal structure which benefits both our new partner and us, and we look forward to working with Redcentric across our broader national footprint.”
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