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.