North Lincolnshire Signs Extended BT Fibre Broadband Rollout Contract

The North and North East Lincolnshire council in East England has now officially signed a second Superfast Extension Programme contract with BT to bring the operators “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network to even more premises.

Sadly the pre-election (purdah) period means that we won’t be getting an official press release about it for a while because neither BT nor the council are allowed to talk about such things; this also applies to many other areas than just the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK contract(s).

At present the Northernlincs Broadband project aims to roll-out BT’s “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) speeds to cover 92.5% of North and North East Lincolnshire by June 2015 and at the end of last year some 26,320 additional premises had already been upgraded (uptake stood at 7.8% among related areas). The aim of the second contract will thus be to push this figure towards the Government’s 95% target by 2017.

In terms of funding, BDUK has committed £1.18m to the second contract and this is being matched by the local authority to make for a total public investment of £2.36m. It’s expected that BT will also contribute, although we are currently unable to get confirmation of that until after the election period.