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CEO Greg Mesch says demand for speed, low latency has outstripped supply.
CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch this week warned that demand for capacity has outstripped supply, and called for a paradigm shift in building network infrastructure.
Speaking at Total Telecom Congress on Wednesday, Mesch urged operators to rebuild networks from the ground up, rather than building on top of legacy infrastructure.
"Using what we have in the ground just isn’t working, it’s not going to work and we just need to look at the forecasted data speeds and traffic to realise the capacity we need is not in the ground."
Mesch continued: “There has been a fundamental shift and what we’ve found is that demand has now outstripped supply. Today, that demand is for high speeds and low latency and the only way to deliver that is fibre. The model of building on copper is dead.”
According to Mesch, no market should be excluded from this transformation, with the public sector, businesses, mobile operators and consumers all needing better connectivity.
This transformation cannot be achieved using "Victorian-designed infrastructure" and "we only need to look as far as Japan, China and Korea, where everything is fibre" to realise what the new model needs to be, he said.
"It is incumbent and mandatory for European cities to get on to a new paradigm of building infrastructure as it is the only way we are going to survive the next 100 years," he added.
Mesch also discussed the issue of the digital divide between rural and urban areas. While CityFibre does connect some outlying villages close to some its so-called Gigabit cities, it does not actively look to invest in rural areas.
"We concentrate on where we get a good return on investment," he said. "So the cities we go after have the highest GDP and they can afford the infrastructure, and need it badly," he said.
Mesch also dismissed the idea of a universal service obligation (USO) as something that would not work in practice, and used Sweden as an example of an alternative approach. In Stockholm, consumers in rural areas have started to pay up to £1,000 to have fibre put into their homes, he said.
"They see it as an investment in their home and I think that is where we have to go," he explained. "People will spend money on a new kitchen because they see it as a home improvement but for some reason we don’t think paying to put fibre in is worth it so what you are left with is a cheap, bad service."
