Gigabit network is more than a fringe benefit for city of Edinburgh

Frequently listed among the better-connected cities in the UK when it comes to provision of superfast broadband, Edinburgh is not immediately the city that comes to mind when you think about the places most in need of broadband investment.

Indeed, according to Edinburgh City Council member Frank Ross, the city has been struggling to find businesses that are dissatisfied enough with their current broadband service to want to take up the government’s £3,000 broadband connection voucher grants.

Nevertheless, says Ross, there is always a danger that if “you stand still, you start going backwards”. A recent survey of IT decision makers in Scotland suggested that more than half thought their broadband service was generally inferior to that received south of the border, and Edinburgh has been slipping down the league tables of late.

This now looks set to change for the better. Earlier in 2015, pure fibre infrastructure supplier CityFibre announced a 50km fibre network, the Edinburgh Core, to be constructed in partnership with local internet service provider (ISP) Commsworld.

At the start of September 2015, this contract was extended when the council signed up to connect 294 of its sites in an agreement worth £5.6m, which would replace an ageing and capacity-constrained copper circuits provided by BT in a seven-year deal that comes with an option to extend to 19 years, making the total contract potentially worth £16m.

CityFibre, known for its Gigabit City programme, has already set up programmes to bring fibre broadband to Coventry, Peterborough, York and Aberdeen.

The first phase of the network covers the city centre and is currently constructed under CityFibre’s Well Planned City model. The model allows the supplier to alter its plans on the fly in response to where it sees high levels of demand from potential customers. When complete, it hopes to bring gigabit speeds to more than 7,000 businesses.

“CityFibre was looking for cities to engage with, cities in which there would be a clear commercial return on investment. They recognised that Edinburgh is booming and out-performing every city in the UK outside London by some distance,” says Ross.

CityFibre’s development manager James McClafferty – formerly with BT – says bringing pure fibre broadband services to Edinburgh has become his “biggest and shiniest project”.

“My ambition is to take CityFibre to Scotland’s seven largest cities: Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Inverness, Perth, Stirling and Edinburgh,” he tells Computer Weekly.

“Edinbugh is the capital city, it has the Fringe Festival, it has all sorts of flavours you don’t get elsewhere in Scotland. Outside of London and Frankfurt, it probably has the biggest banking sector in Europe. Growing up around that is a tech-savvy group of businesses, startups and app developers – even gaming.

“This is about taking existing businesses into a new zone and scaling them up. They need resilience and reliable, high-capacity connectivity,” he says.

Although CityFibre’s ambition is to deliver a 150km network around and throughout Edinburgh, McClafferty is reluctant to suggest he might stop at that point because “if the growth forecasts are true, we’re going to need more than that – the appetite for fibre is palpable”.

“It also helps that we have a local SME [small to medium-sized enterprise] partner in Commsworld as they know the turf. We always prefer to partner with a local ISP, and Commsworld has been established for 20 years and has a huge customer base in Edinburgh that they can commit,” says McClafferty.