CityFibre has agreed to an acquisition agreement of £ 538 million with two infrastructure investment companies, stating that the acquisition will allow it to establish itself as a true rival of BT Openreach.
Buyers are private equity firm Antin Infrastructure Partners and Goldman. The Sachs West Street Global Infrastructure Partners (WSIP) and CityFibre managed fund has recommended that shareholders accept the offer, as it will give the firm better access to financing for its ambitions.
Strengthening
"Under private ownership, CityFibre will be able to obtain alternative and potentially easier access to the financing required for its announced FTTH deployment," said Chris Stone, president of CityFibre.
"This will strengthen the company's ability to fulfill its vision of providing full fiber infrastructure to the 20 percent of the UK market."
CityFibre is one of several alternative network providers (altnets) that are implementing infrastructure The vast majority of superfast broadband connections in the United Kingdom are driven by Openreach's fiber-to-cabinet (FTTC) technology, which uses copper over the last few hundred meters of the connection.
Openreach moves forward with its own full fiber plans, but the creation of a rival network would increase competition in space, benefiting broadband providers and mobile networks that believe that more fiber can improve the return network and densify the networks.
CityFibre does not operate commercial broadband services sold to other communications providers in general. He has built several city-based networks, and in 2015 bought the KCOM infrastructure outside of Hull and East Yorkshire. According to the results of the whole year, CityFibre now has 3,740km of fiber infrastructure, compared to 3,383km the previous year.
Last year, it agreed to an agreement with Vodafone to bring full fiber to at least one million premises by 2021, a figure that could increase to five million. The first locations have been named Milton Keynes, Aberdeen and Peterborough and it has just been announced that Coventry, Edinburgh, Huddersfield and Stirling will be the next cities to be covered.