CityFibre appoints Peter Manning as Chairman

Telecoms and public sector expert, Peter Manning, joins CityFibre as it leads infrastructure transformation that creates Gigabit Cities across the UK. CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent fibre optic infrastructure provider to secondary cities, today announced that it has appointed as Chairman, Peter Manning, also Chairman of Marston Group and formerly CEO of Colt Telecom. Mr Manning will join CityFibre’s board immediately to support CEO, Greg Mesch, in taking one of the UK’s leading and fastest-growing fibre infrastructure providers through the growth ensuing from the strong demand for ultrahigh-speed internet. “The UK economy can be significantly boosted through the availability of true ultrafast broadband and 100% fibre networks are the only way to deliver this. With almost 30,000km of fibre in the ground, connecting more than 350 [EB1] sites and data centres across the UK, we are the country’s largest independent provider of fibre to secondary cities. Peter Manning is a significant addition to our board as he has strong experience in public sector and telecoms. He will greatly add to the move into the next phase of growth as we pick the next cities for our transformational gigabit infrastructure and bring on board further major service providers to allow them to finally compete offering millions of homes and thousands of businesses revolutionary gigabit speed internet access,” says Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre. “The lack of high quality network infrastructure in the UK has, so far, left our towns and cities far behind their European counterparts and the lack of gigabit speed internet seriously affects their ability to compete. The adoption of fibre is at a tipping point and CityFibre is in pole position to take it forward. This is a great time to be in the fibre infrastructure industry and I look forward to working with CityFibre to refine the strategy and drive the roll out of truly transformational networks that will benefit the whole of the UK,” says Peter Manning. Peter Manning has been Chairman of Marston Group, backed by Inflexion Private Equity, since June 2012. Other former non-executive roles include Chairman of Reliance Secure Task Management, supplying outsourced services to 15 UK police forces, UK Border Authorities and the Ministry of Justice. From 2008 to 2011, he was Chairman at mobile network coverage leader, Axell Wireless Ltd. Prior to this, Peter Manning spent three years as CEO of HBS Ltd, a Terra Firma private equity investment. HBS is a supplier of business process outsourcing to UK local authorities, which became a strategic partner for IBM and SAP in the public sector outsourcing market. From 1999 to 2003, Peter was COO, then CEO and President, of COLT Telecom Plc., a pan-European telecom operator with revenues in excess of £1 billion. Earlier Peter held roles as CEO of Concert Communications Inc. the JV between BT and MCI based in Reston, Virginia, USA. During his earlier career, Peter Manning held various senior positions with BT organisations in the UK, Europe and the USA including leading the expansion of BT into mainland Europe as COO of BT Europe – British Telecom, between 1994 and 1996. ENDS CityFibre Media Contact: Maggie Zaboura Zaboura Consultancy Ltd T. 020 7297 3371 E. maggie@zaboura.com About CityFibre CityFibre (www.cityfibre.com) is one of the UK’s leading fibre optic infrastructure providers. By building dedicated fibre optic networks for the public and private sectors, we empower data-hungry users throughout the country, by unleashing gigabit speeds on future-proofed technology. Our transformational fibre infrastructure projects comprise point-to-point connections, metro rings and Fibre-to-the-Premises networks that make possible Next Generation Access and gigabit level services direct to local authorities, businesses and homes. CityFibre manages over 100 private fibre projects and seven separate metropolitan fibre networks under long-term contract with local authorities, police forces, healthcare organisations and universities. With almost 30,000km of fibre in the ground, connecting more than 350 sites and data centres across the UK, we are the country’s largest independent provider of fibre in secondary cities. In Bournemouth, CityFibre owns the largest FTTH project in the UK. With over 21,000 homes ready for service, the network enables service providers to deliver unprecedented ultra-fast broadband services. CityFibre’s Internet Service Provider Gigler, is the UK’s flagship pure fibre service, providing all customers with up to 1 Gigabit per second download speeds (100x the UK’s average) and up to 500 Megabits per second upload speeds (200x the UK’s average).