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Bechtel’s Impact Report

CityFibre

United Kingdom
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Creating digital connectivity for 8 million U.K. homes

Digital infrastructure is key to opening access and opportunity by building a smarter, more connected, more equitable, and sustainable world.

CityFibre is working to unlock the digital potential of communities across the U.K. by building a full fibre network that supports quicker and more reliable broadband connections. By the end of 2025, Bechtel will have helped CityFibre achieve its goal to reach one-third of the U.K. market.

In addition to its own £4 billion roll out programme—which will cover 285 cities, towns and villages, reaching 8 million homes, 800,000 businesses, 250,000 small-cell access points, and 400,00 public sector buildings such as schools and hospitals—CityFibre is also supporting in the U.K. government’s Build Digital U.K. (BDUK) Agency’s “Project Gigabit,” which is a £5 billion investment programme that seeks to deliver lightning-fast, reliable broadband to homes and business in rural areas across the U.K. This will allow CityFibre to extend its network to rural areas around the 285 cities in its own programme and support the U.K. government’s agenda to level up communities across the U.K.   

Listen as Richard Thorpe, CityFibre’s chief delivery officer, discusses the rollout, and follow CityFibre’s progress here.

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Collaboration

Bechtel’s engagement with CityFibre began in 2020 and was expanded and extended in 2021 to help scale the rollout, while continuing to deliver at pace, in line with CityFibre’s ambition.

Our people are fully integrated into CityFibre’s organization, leveraging Bechtel’s mega-project expertise in project controls, contracts management, and environment, safety, and health with focused leadership and construction management in the areas with the greatest density of parallel builds. Bechtel’s team is also providing functional support across all regions as well as developing resource models to ensure thousands more operatives are trained and available to build partners to help construct the network.  

What our customer says

In 2021, Greg Mesch, CEO at CityFibre, said: “It's a pleasure to be extending our alliance with Bechtel after a hugely successful year as partners. Over the last twelve months, they have worked in lockstep with our teams to deliver an extraordinary acceleration of our rollout. This pace will only increase as we commence new projects and maximise the productivity of each build. We’re delighted that Bechtel, with their unparalleled experience of complex, scaled construction projects, will be working alongside us in the years ahead as we continue to build the U.K.’s finest Full Fibre infrastructure platform.”