CityFibre is accelerating its efforts to become a powerful national competitor to BT Openreach with the £5m acquisition of Redcentric’s 137Km worth of metropolitan local access duct and fibre assets.
The deal takes the number of metro networks owned by CityFibre to 40 across the UK with the addition of Cambridge, Portsmouth and Southampton footprints.
It also increases CityFibre’s footprints in existing locations including Nottingham, Derby and Northampton.
As part of the deal, Redcentric will lease back access to the dark fibre in the network for £4.5m, effectively becoming a major new customer of CityFibre.
CityFibre said it will continue to support 188 Redcentric customer connections, and will make the new network available to wholesale partners at an unspecified date.
Redcentric has also agreed a framework deal covering the use of CityFibre’s infrastructure in other cities.
Redcentric CEO Fraser Fisher said: “This disposal is in line with our strategy of control over our customer affecting core assets while not tying up capital where ownership is unnecessary.
“We will continue to service customers in Cambridge and Portsmouth exactly as before, and expect to generate additional revenues and network efficiencies over time as a result of our developing relationship with CityFibre.”
CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch said: “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.”
CityFibre has recently declared Northampton and Reading as its two most recent Gigabit cities, building on the acquisition of KCOM’s national network assets for £90m last year.
Earlier in the year also, CityFibre announced its ultra-fast roll-out in Bristol, in which they commercialised 82km of pure fibre network.
