THE boss of the company bringing lightning-fast full fibre broadband to Bournemouth has said it will provide a “spark” that can generate at least 1,000 jobs.

CityFibre is ploughing £38million into the town as part of a £4billion investment in 100 areas outside London.

Chief executive Greg Mesch said Poole and Christchurch would get the service as soon as possible and that the rollout of the service had become “unstoppable”.

He told business people in Bournemouth: “We’re investing £38m into just Bournemouth alone and we’re prepared to up that investment into Poole and Christchurch and to make it somewhere in the neighbourhood of, I think, about £75m-£80m.

“We just need the cities to understand what we’re doing is bringing a competitive force that will help you and your citizens have a richer life, better industrial output, raise your GDP and sustain you for the next 100 years.”

Full fibre internet delivers much faster speeds than the commonly used copper cables – transporting up to one gigabit of data per second. As well as homes and businesses, it delivers the internet to cell sites to form the “backbone” of the 5G network.

Mr Mesch claimed the UK had been held back by the dominance of BT Openreach, but that CityFibre had shaken up the market and caused its competitors to cut their prices in areas where they overlapped.

“It’s a really simple formula. Once a full fibre network is in place, there is ‘spark’, meaning we are going to reduce the price and give you more,” he said.

“If you do that spark, every economist says it should increase GDP sustainably for at least a decade by one percentage point. If you talk about your city, that’s 1,000 jobs, that’s 100 business starts right there.”

A group of business people were taken to see contractor CCN building the network. They also visited Bournemouth’s attraction Centre VR to see how full fibre could power virtual reality.

They were told 18,582 homes were ready to get full fibre and 200 installations were carried out last month. Domestic connections are initially exclusive to Vodafone.

The full fibre plans were laid with the old Bournemouth council, before the merger to create BCP Council.

“Now we acknowledge we have to incorporate Poole and Christchurch in that,” said Mr Mesch.

“And the way we’re going to do it is we’re going to make a huge success out of the core build here, we’re going to make a huge success out of CCN. We’re going to triple their size of their company, we’re going to pump steady streams of capital into their company and we’re going to let them build right across this area and never stop, because it’s unstoppable. Every place we put our services in, the users switch. That’s just what’s truly amazing.”

In other areas, the number of people complaining about digging up the roads had been vastly outnumbered by the people keen to know when they could be connected, he said.

“There is a whole network infrastructure that needs to be laid which means I can’t get away from the absolute sheer fact that you guys are going to dig up a lot of roads. We’re going to try and design it and plan it so we dig the roads once,” he added.

The UK currently has the second lowest percentage of properties connected to full fibre – eight per cent compared with 75 per cent for top-placed Japan.

Mr Mesch said: “The rebuilding of the infrastructure across the UK, across the world, across all western economies, has to be done otherwise there’s just no hope. We’ll continue to grind down as nations with slower industrial output because the service-based industries and the service-based knowledge workers are where the future is going and we all know that.

“It’s not about building stuff any more and moving it around on railways.”

CityFibre stepped in to take over superfast broadband in Bournemouth in 2011 after H20 Networks – then trading as FibreCity – ran into financial problems.

Mr Mesch said: “I had to personally lay off about 200 workers – 100 of them were here.”