CityFibre appoints Richard Thorpe as Chief Delivery Officer

Highly experienced fibre network delivery chief bolsters CityFibre’s accelerating Gigabit City build programme.

CityFibre, the UK’s leading alternative provider of wholesale full fibre infrastructure, today announced the appointment of Richard Thorpe as Chief Delivery Officer. In the newly created role, Richard joins the executive team and assumes control of CityFibre’s network delivery strategy and capabilities as the company continues to establish itself as the UK’s third national digital platform. Richard joins from Digicel Group where he was Chief Information Officer, responsible for the IT strategy and transformation of the entire BSS estate for the Caribbean mobile and fixed line operator. Prior to that, Richard has led a variety of large-scale full fibre network rollouts in roles including Head of Fibre Deployment at Vodafone, and Head of Construction for NBN in Australia. As Chief Delivery Officer, Richard will be responsible for optimising the end-to-end network delivery process as well as the design and implementation of a target operating model capable of supporting CityFibre’s rapidly accelerating Gigabit City build programme. The £2.5bn Gigabit City build programme targets the rollout of wholesale full fibre infrastructure to more than five million homes and businesses across more than 60 towns and cities by 2025, representing approximately 20% of the UK market. In a little over a year since its start, CityFibre has already mobilised in 27 towns and cities, has network construction underway in 16 of those cities and towns creating 1,600 construction jobs, and Gigabit-speed services already live in 10 cities. “As the UK’s third national digital infrastructure platform, CityFibre’s build programme could not be more critical. We have made huge progress in our rollout so far but as we continue to accelerate, we have decided to create the new role of Chief Delivery Officer to ensure we stay on plan. We are delighted to welcome Richard to that role. He brings huge experience of delivering large-scale network rollouts and will help drive the pace and maintain the quality as we grow.” says Greg Mesch, Chief Executive Officer at CityFibre. Richard Thorpe added: “I’m delighted to join what I consider to be one of the most exciting digital infrastructure projects underway worldwide. My initial focus will be to build on the great progress made so far, optimising the end-to-end process, ensuring the right skills are being put to work in the right places, and analysing the way we work with contractors, encouraging long term growth as we scale together. Ultimately, I’m determined to accelerate our build programmes while retaining the high quality necessary to be a trusted national network. The progress CityFibre has made to date is impressive but I am confident we can inject still more rocket fuel into our build engine.”