Representatives from CityFibre will attend the meeting to give a presentation and answer questions on their work in the Borough.

Representatives from Grain Connect Limited will also attend the meeting online to answer questions about their planned work in the Borough.

CityFibre were a telecommunications service provider that was rolling out a new gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband Internet Service Provider network across Reading and into Wokingham and West Berkshire.  The project had started at the beginning of 2021 and the company had hired Instalcom to carry out the civil engineering work/installation works.  Once installed CityFibre would rent their fibre lines to telecommunications companies so that they didn’t have to install new fibre themselves.  Grain Connect Limited were also looking to provide a similar service in Reading, but on a smaller scale than CityFibre.

Stacey King, Regional Partnership Director CityFibre, and Paul Wilson, Head of Area Build CityFibre, attended the meeting and gave a presentation on CityFibre’s operations in Reading.  Roy Griffin, Regional Partnership Director City Fibre, joined the meeting online.

The presentation explained that CityFibre had been running a national programme to deploy a new generation of future-proofed digital infrastructure for the UK, were the second largest internet provider in the UK and their mission was to bring first class, state of the art broadband infrastructure services to Reading, including Wokingham and West Berkshire.  The company were in 285 locations nationally and were building in 75 of those locations currently. The places the company was looking to deploy in were part of the Government’s Levelling Up agenda.  £4 billion was being invested nationally and within Reading this equated to a £58m investment.  The technology being deployed would serve everybody; domestic consumers, businesses, particularly smaller businesses and the public sector.  The company was building a once in generation upgrade of digital infrastructure in Reading by building brand new networks for the future.  CityFibre aimed to use existing access where they could, such as poles and ducts, and would rent space from Openreach and therefore the would be much less disruptive where that infrastructure was appropriate for them to use with work being completed more quickly.  The company was delivering to 100,000 properties across Reading.

The network was a wholesale network which meant that CityFibre did not sell to end users instead they had 35 Internet Service Provider partners within the network, although not all of them served every town or city and in Reading there were five ISPs in the network providing a range of choice for different budgets and requirements.

Finally, research had shown that the £58m being invested in Reading would result in £1bn of economic growth over 15 year.

The Committee discussed the presentation, asked questions and raised a number of points including the following:

·         Issues with the work in Caversham had included spoil and barriers being left on site when work had finished and traffic lights also remaining in place after the work had been completed;

·         The company acknowledged that there were lessons to be learnt from their work in Caversham such as, making sure they went out and pre-warned residents of work that was going to take place and making use of radio and local newspapers to ensure people were as aware  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6