Colt reported strong top line growth in 2016 and a new executive leadership team has pledged to continue this trend having implemented a strategic and cultural shift in the organisation.

Colt’s operations have been segmented into the core areas of innovation, the Colt IQ Network and improving the customer experience.

There has also been an increase in investment in sales and marketing.

To help deliver the increased network capacity and reach, Colt has appointed a new Chief Commercial Officer, Tom Regent. The company will hire hundreds more staff to support customers.

CEO Carl Grivner (pictured) said: “We are fortunate to not have many of the distractions of our peers, such as wireless, consumer and content.

“This means we can focus on building an intelligent network to meet the businesses requirements of today’s demanding enterprises.

“In fact, we believe our customers, and indeed all our competitors’ customers, should be more demanding of the industry. We are up for the challenge and we are confident we will deliver.”

Grivner added that investing in the Colt IQ Network is vital. It currently spans 24,500 buildings and 700 data centres, and serves, in the main, enterprises with an increasingly global reach while retaining a local presence.

Colt’s investment this year will triple the number of sites across the Colt IQ Network capable of providing 100G enabled Ethernet and IP connectivity, and optical services up to 9.6Tbps capacity per site.

According to Grivner the customer experience matters now more than ever. So Colt will roll out On Demand network services, and also redesign its internal processes and systems to bring service delivery times down from weeks to days and put customers in control. The revamp is critical to managing growth in customer acquisitions, which amounted to 1,700 new customers worldwide in 2016.

“Almost 25 years ago, we emerged as a disruptive challenger in the market, and our mission for 2017 is to increase this challenger status as a digital enabler with global reach and local presence and agility,” added Grivner.

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At present BT has only just begun their initial planning and survey work for the 10 year deal, with the new network expected to go live sometime during theSpring 2016. The deployment, which will utilise the existing CCTV network for capacity, won’t cost the council anything and may also be used to help improve local 4G mobile phone coverage.

Rory Palmer, Deputy City Mayor, said:

“We already have free wi-fi in our libraries and we know how popular wi-fi hotspots in city centre coffee shops and other venues are. We’d like to be able to extend this offer so that people can get online even more easily.

Free wi-fi will also support our plans to promote economic growth in the city as well as being an essential infrastructure for a modern connected city.”

BT has also made similar deployments in Cardiff, Gloucester, Glasgow, Nottingham and Newcastle etc.

The post Leicester UK City Council to Deploy FREE WiFi Internet Connectivity appeared first on United Networks.

So far Gigaclear’s network has already become available to roughly 15,000 homes and businesses in rural parts of Oxfordshire, Essex, Kent, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Rutland and Gloucestershire in England.

On top of that the ISP, which currently owns and operates 56 rural fibre networks (plus 35 under construction), has also signed a number of Government (state aid) supported Broadband Delivery UKcontracts (e.g. Gloucestershire – here, Essex – here and Berkshire – here etc.) and they hope to reach approximately 40,000 premises by the end of 2016.

However beyond that they also have commercial plans to reach another 30-40K premises (around 80,000 total), which is likely to require further investment. Gigaclear has already managed to attract£48.6 million in investment and now they’re about to get another €25m (£19m) via a loan.

The FT states that most of this loan will be coming from the European Investment Bank (EIB) and indeed it’s said to be the EIB’s “first targeted support for rural communications in the UK“, as well as also being the maximum available under their InnovFin (EU finance for innovators) mid-cap growth finance scheme.

Matthew Hare, CEO of Gigaclear, said:

“We’re transforming lives and businesses, giving people access to the fastest internet speeds to be found anywhere in the world and technologically future-proofing these rural communities for years.”

One problem with the big spender approach to infrastructure development is that it will still take a long time to recoup the investment, not that this appears to worry Gigaclear or any of the other fibre optic ISPs.

Investors often seem able to see the long-term potential of fibre optic connectivity, which has also attracted them to other operators like Cityfibre and Hyperoptic. Assuming Ofcom doesn’t negatively upset that market too much with their Strategic Review then there’s no reason why this shouldn’t continue.

At this point it’s worth reminding our readers of Gigaclear’s “medium-term” target from their 2014 AIM float: “The Company’s target, assuming capital of £180 million (including the proceeds of the Placing) is deployed over the medium-term, is to make ultrafast fibre broadband available to 200,000 rural properties.”

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