The last decade’s digital revolution delivering superfast broadband to the UK never quite made it up to Aberdeen.
Greg Mesch, chief executive and founder of infrastructure builder CityFibre, wants to fix this.
In January, his AIM-listed firm will start digging up streets in the Granite City in order to start laying the fibre that promises to turn Aberdeen into “Scotland’s first Gigabit City”.
Since January the company has raised £46.5million from institutional investors to back its plan to connect a number of UK “second cities” which has since been focusing York, Peterborough, and now Aberdeen.
Mr Mesch is enthusiastic about the project.
“The second tier cities in the UK never got in on the telecom boom and never built fibre infrastructure,” he explains.
“It happened in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. A lot of it was the density of those areas.
“In the UK it was more dispersed. Aberdeen for instance didn’t even get a cable network.”
He’s done this sort of business before.
Mr Mesch grew up in Colorado. As a precocious 26-year-old maths and computer science graduate he said he “got lucky as an entrepreneur” and set up an upstart rival to AT&T.
The cheerful American says he had no intention to become an international business man, but at the age of 32 found himself in Dublin to help Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien set up Esat Telecom, which later become BT Ireland.
Having become well versed in start ups and venture capital fund raising, he went on to make the founding investment in Versatel Telecom, which operated in Holland, Belgium and Germany. He built that firm up and sold it for over £1billion.
The partners and investors that have backed him for years have now come together again to form CityFibre, to finish off the job in the UK that was cut short by the dotcom bust.
In Aberdeen, the company has joined forces with the well-known ISP, Internet For Business (IFB). The firm, owned by owner of the chemist chain, John Michie, is CityFibre’s “anchor”.
“It used to be the model of ‘build it and they will come’,” says Mr Mesch. “We don’t do that. I take an anchor contract that covers almost 100% of the initial build costs.”
He notes that Aberdeen is “unique” in that its biggest ISP has over 800 customers in the city.
“IFB is re-buying the infrastructure from BT. We are putting in an alternate competitive infrastructure and swapping the customers over,” he says.
The company aims to bury several hundred miles of fibre in the city, called the Aberdeen Core, running close by to mobile phone masts that will be upgraded to 4G, as well as schools, hospitals and offices.
Currently, the firm is planning the route of the fibre. In order to determine where the demand lies, the firm has launched a “demand aggregation” process through the launch of its “gig up” campaign last month.
“All the businesses that register will shape the network deployment,” he says.
“Every business now should register to say I would like to have a competitive network in my area because all I have is BT.
“Everything we do is 100 times faster than what BT is offering – at a lower price.”