CityFibre has appointed Bechtel 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 (pictured), 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.”
CityFibre will begin to onboard Bechtel’s teams immediately, fully integrating them within CityFibre’s existing organisational structure.
John Williams, Bechtel’s UK Infrastructure Managing Director, said: “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 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.