Copper is dead in Deddington – the end of an era.

We welcome BT's announcement for pure fibre to the home (FTTH) services to the village of Deddington and their recognition that a copper-free network is the future for communications in the UK. The announcement that BT is beginning the decommissioning of their copper network marks the end of an era that has lasted since the dawn of telegraphy. CityFibre's optical network heralded the start of a new era, the optical era, and BT's withdrawal of copper validates our business model for a pure FTTH infrastructure. CityFibre is an agent of change in this space and is building an "open access" fibre optic network to homes and businesses in a number of cities throughout the UK. Our open access network is available for all service providers to extend their services over optical fibres to the residential market and this will shorten the timescale for rollout of this vital national infrastructure. The UK is already losing ground to other countries in Europe and beyond, where pure FTTH infrastructure has already been deployed. Fibre optic infrastructure is a prerequisite for competition in the 21st Century and we regard it as an imperative for UK plc to re-establish itself as a leader in this market. A pure FTTH infrastructure provides an alternative choice for the British consumer who currently can only receive services on either copper wires or copper-coax cable. The benefits for the consumer of services delivered over a pure FTTH infrastructure include ultrafast bandwidths of 1000Mbps for upload as well as download which don't degrade with distance, so that no matter how far away people live from the exchange their bandwidth speed is guaranteed. Further to this is the fact that a pure FTTH infrastructure is future-proofed; as the cost of switching equipment decreases we can see 10Gbps (10,000Mbps) services being rollout out in the longer term simply by changing the equipment in customers' premises. An interesting side effect of bandwidth delivery over fibre is that the cost per Mbps plummets to a few pence, instead of a few pounds, and service provisioning becomes a matter of a few keystrokes instead of truck rolls. This radically alters how services can be deployed and who deploys them. Forward thinking cities such as York for example, where we already have significant fibre optic infrastructure, can see how to address the digital divide, the pernicious social exclusion, by building on this infrastructure. CityFibre is engaged in conversations with many service providers that are interested in taking advantage of a national fibre optic infrastructure today.