CityFibre appoints Bechtel to strengthen the scaling of its Full Fibre deployment

Bechtel appointment will support step change in mobilisation of build projects as CityFibre awards up to £1.5 billion in construction contracts in coming months.

CityFibre, the UK’s third national digital infrastructure platform, has announced that it is has appointed Bechtel, one of the world’s leading engineering, construction and project management companies, to support a major acceleration in its full fibre rollout as it awards up to £1.5bn in construction contracts in the coming months and commences mobilisation across an additional 29 towns and cities.

Bechtel is best known for the delivery of major infrastructure projects across the globe and has extensive experience in the communications infrastructure market. It has overseen metro fibre and fibre to the premises (FTTP) rollouts for AT&T, Verizon, XO and Google Fiber in the US and the Viatel Cerce Pan-European Network. Bechtel has more than seven decades of experience in the UK market, successfully managing major construction contracts including the Channel Tunnel and High Speed 1.

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive at CityFibre said: “The demand for world-class digital infrastructure deployments from the Government, Ofcom and crucially our current and prospective customers, is increasing by the day. Bechtel’s expertise in the delivery of national infrastructure projects will complement our existing teams and ensure we can rapidly increase the number of parallel build projects, while still delivering the high quality of network demanded by our customers and theirs.

“Delivering full fibre nationwide by 2025 is a critical target and a huge undertaking. We are determined to be a major contributor to this target. This landmark partnership with Bechtel is another important demonstration of how CityFibre is doing everything to ensure delivery and maximise our contribution while helping to ensure a healthy and competitive digital infrastructure market.”

CityFibre will begin to onboard Bechtel’s teams immediately, fully integrating them within CityFibre’s existing organisational structure. Bechtel’s expertise will be harnessed to help reach optimal productivity in each location in the shortest possible time. This will focus on implementing a consistent approach to the mobilisation and management of construction partners at scale, in which it has vast experience. It will also support CityFibre as it introduces new processes to ensure that CityFibre’s network architecture is adhered to and that high quality is maintained when deploying at scale.

John Williams, Bechtel’s UK Infrastructure Managing Director, said: “We are excited to partner with CityFibre to help make real their ambition to transform digital infrastructure across the UK. We will be bringing our skills in rapid mobilisation and large-scale infrastructure delivery to the team. Our agreement with CityFibre is part of a deliberate strategy to diversify and align our UK business with the emerging growth sectors of the economy.”

The first wave of construction contract awards under CityFibre’s Accelerated Tenders Award Programme are expected in the coming weeks. The new projects will create thousands of jobs across CityFibre’s construction partners. By the end of 2021, it is anticipated that network construction will be underway in more than 100 towns and cities across the UK.