North American developer of open access fiber optic networks, SiFi Networks has secured significant investment from the Smart City Infrastructure Fund to bring high speed connectivity to more areas of the USA.
The fund has made an initial investment of up to $50 million to enable network expansion into more cities simultaneously through the recruitment and training of additional industry specialists. It will also help to accelerate SiFi Networks’ FiberCity deployments.
FiberCity networks are designed for internet service providers, 4G/5G carriers and other service providers. The networks were named thus because fibre passes every home and business in the city, and smart city access points are put in place as standard, helping to ensure the city is future-proofed.
SiFi says that the networks are also designed to eliminate the need for over ground cabling, allowing service providers to gain three to four times more residential and business subscribers than can be achieved by committing the same level resources to build their own exclusive networks. In terms of the investment, it is expected that a further support of up to $400m will provide the project funding for the building of new fibre networks throughout several cities in the US.
Mike Harris, co-founder of SiFi Networks said: ‘This injection of capital will kick start the expansion of our business to meet the expected exponential growth in demand for high speed connectivity and enable city rights of way to be efficiently converted to project readiness.’
