BT Wrong-foots Gigaclear as Ashley Village Raise £15k for “Fibre Broadband”

Gigaclear’s hope of being able to roll-out a 1000Mbps capable fibre optic (FTTP) broadband service in the small rural Northamptonshire (England) village of Ashley have been dented after BT successfully encouraged locals to raise £15,000 in order to have their slower ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) solution installed.

Apparently the money was raised in the space of just four weeks (Ashley Broadband Fundraising Campaign), with support from 80% of local residents and 13 small local businesses, and a contract with BTOpenreach has now been agreed. This will see a new Street Cabinet and underground fibre optic infrastructure being built to accommodate the villages 120 homes.

BT has also put some of its own money into the project, although interestingly they don’t say how much. The 50% deposit has now been paid by the village to Openreach with the remaining funds stored in the village account at the Market Harborough Building Society for payment on completion.

It’s also been almost exactly four weeks since Gigaclear announced that Ashley was one of the villages on their target list for an even faster Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) deployment (here) in the Welland Valley area (here), although the investment case has now been weakened by BTOpenreach’s rival development. Still we note that Gigaclear’s deployment wouldn’t have required the community to invest their own money.

Owen Moody, BT’s East Midlands Director, said:

“We welcome the opportunity to work with local communities, such as Ashley, so that they can benefit from fibre broadband. The fact that this will be an ‘open’ network available to all broadband service providers on an equal basis ensures the villagers will have access to highly competitive pricing and products from a wide range of providers.

The community of Ashley has shown great vision in coming together and seizing this one-off opportunity to connect to the fibre broadband network. It is a major step forward for the village. Whatever you do on-line you can do it better with fibre broadband. A new fibre customer joins the Openreach network every 22 seconds, 24 hours a day and we look forward to bringing this new technology into Ashley during 2015.”

Ashley is one of several areas in the county to exist outside of the local state aid fuelled Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme with BT (Superfast Northamptonshire), which is one of the reasons why it had been targeted by Gigaclear. As a local update said recently, “Villagers can be assured that our disappointment about the lack of support from Northamptonshire County Council has been made abundantly clear to the relevant councillor“.

Never the less BT said that their development will start in the “coming months” and the first customers should then be able to go live during Spring 2015. It’s perhaps no coincidence that one of the leading village residents and campaigners, Adrian Forsell, is also a director for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) and therefore commands some influence.