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JT named ‘operator’ of the year in prestigious European fibre-to-the-home awards

JT picked up the ‘Operator Award’ at the 2013 Fibre-To-The-Home (FTTH) Council Europe Awards which were announced in London yesterday on Thursday 21 February.

The FTTH Council Europe is the leading FTTH industry body and the awards were announced at its 10th annual FTTH Conference, which brought together representatives from leading European telecoms providers, industry experts, investors, analysts and developers at London’s Excel.

JT was recognised for its Gigabit Jersey fibre-to-the-home programme, which was launched last year with the aim of making Jersey one of the most fibre-connected places in the world by 2016. Now in their second year, the awards are designed to identify one individual and one operator who have shown strong support for the FTTH Council Europe over the previous year and to reward enthusiasm and innovative approaches to FTTH deployment and services.

Karin Ahl, President of the FTTH Council Europe, said “We are very pleased to hand out the FTTH Council Europe Award to JT this year, because of the operator’s clear commitment to deploying FTTH and making it available to all homes and businesses in Jersey in the ‘Gigabit Isles’ programme.  It is very important for us to ensure that success stories such as JT’s receive proper recognition and are made visible to a wide audience of European broadband stakeholders, present here at the FTTH Conference in London. We thank JT for their contribution to FTTH adoption and wish them continued success.”

Graeme Millar, CEO of JT, was presented with the award at the closing plenary session on 21 February, he said:  “Receiving recognition from the FTTH Council Europe for our Gigabit Isles initiative is very welcome news, especially having just recently reached the first anniversary of our roll-out in Jersey. Our world-class project is designed to ensure connectivity for the Island’s future and in doing so we are also striving towards making the Channel Islands a digital hub for Europe, which will bring wider benefits for islanders and for the local economy. It is at this point that I must also thank the States of Jersey for their encouragement and support in helping us to realise this vision to deliver an FTTH Network and secure Jersey’s future connectivity, as well as helping JT move further towards fulfilling our vision to become the partner of choice for global telecoms innovation.”

Mr Millar was also a panel member for the FTTH Conference closing CEO plenary session, bringing together representatives from Europe’s leading telecoms organisations to provide a high-level strategic point of view on the future of the FTTH market in Europe and hot topics discussed included FTTH roll-out. Joining Mr Millar on the CEO panel were representatives from Portugal Telecom, Prysmian Group, Waoo!, Andorra Telecom and Turkcell Superonline. The moderator was Richard Jones, Partner at Ventura Team and author of books including ‘One Day MBA – Skills for Succeeding in Business Today.’

Mr Millar added: “Through our revolutionary five year ‘Gigabit Isles’ fibre programme, JT will provide every consumer and business on the Channel Island of Jersey with the ability to access speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second.  We’re enabling Islanders to take advantage of emerging technologies and advancements well ahead of many of their peers around the world.   An additional benefit has been the launch and creation of an innovative test bed concept we’ve marketed as “JT Lab”, which offers a unique opportunity for global technology businesses to access a commercially live ecosystem to trial new applications and services requiring gigabit-bandwidth.  Allowing companies the ability to test real products, on real customers, on a real fibre network, in real-time.  As well as offering both project management and engineering support.



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JT co-sponsors successful Global Telecom Council Predictions 2013 Event

The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley reported a 64 strong turn-out at its annual predictions event held in January and co-sponsored by JT and Avaya.

Members of the Telecom Council, of which JT has been an active member for more than two years, represented leading international IT and telecommunications companies, attended the day-long event to review the communications advances of the previous year and to make predictions for 2013.

Predictions discussed at the event included:

  • Death of the Laptop
    Progress of mobile payments
    The second coming of Ethernet
    The 3rd ecosystem access
    The Connected Car

JT’s Mark Stuchfield, JT Lab Business Development Manager and Tim Ringsdore, MD of Global Enterprise attended the event and were joined by JT’s Silicon Valley based Global Ambassador Rick Pierson, who delivered a presentation on JT’s Gigabit Jersey programme during the event.

Tim Ringsdore, said: “As an active member of the Telecom Council we regularly attend events such as this which enable us to network with the world’s leading experts in telecommunications. This event was particularly important as it was an opportunity to join in on some key industry discussions on upcoming trends which will effect communications globally and the entire event was labeled a success by all involved.  We were pleased to be able to support the Telecom Council in making this event happen alongside our co-sponsor Avaya.”

He added: “During our trip to the US we were also able meet technology innovators, founders and CEO’s of businesses to talk to them about what we are doing here in Jersey, particularly JT Lab, which is proving to be of great interest to those seeking access to a Tier 1 infrastructure to test new products on before launching them into the UK & Europe. This was also an opportunity for our Silicon Valley representative, Rick Pierson, to introduce us to the world’s leading high-tech organisations that he is forging strong relationships with on our behalf.  We came away with some excellent feedback on Gigabit Jersey and JT Lab which was most encouraging.”