Dormant Manchester UK fiber network finds new life

Gamma, a UK-based competitive provider, on Friday found treasure in a fiber network that's been lying dormant for over 10 years.

Gamma's fiber loop

(Image source: Gamma)

Initially installed by Atlantic Telecom to support the 2002 Commonwealth Games right before it went belly up, Gamma has rechristened the network as "The Loop" with plans to sell both retail services to businesses and government agencies and wholesale fiber services to other area service providers.

Manchester city, according to an ISPreview article, was just awarded £12 million ($19.2 million) in additional public funding to help service providers such as BT (NYSE: BT) extend 80-100 Mbps wireline-based broadband and public WiFi in parts of the city where service providers have struggled to improve service availability.

"This is a recycled asset which Manchester has been sitting on for more than a decade," said Ashley Griffiths, Managing Director of The Loop, in a release about reigniting the network. "We have kept this network maintained and the time is now right to make it available to local businesses."

Delivered over a network that circles the city center and stretches out to Eccles in the West, towards Oldham in the North, Stretford in the South and Gorton in the East, business and government customers will be able to get speeds ranging from as slow as 10 Mbps to as fast as 10 Gbps.

Gamma has an operations and network management center in Manchester's Trafford Park where it currently employs over 85 people.

For more:
- see the release
- ISPreview has this article

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