Cumbria UK Council Signs Extended BT Superfast Broadband Contract

The Cumbria County Council in England has today signed a new Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) contract that will extend the reach of BT’s superfast broadband services to several thousand additional homes and businesses in the area.

At present the existing Connecting Cumbria scheme is already set to bring “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) speeds to 93% of homes and businesses in the county by the end of 2015 (some 70,000+ premises have already benefitted).

By comparison the new Phase 2 deal has been hoping to add another 5,000+ premises (equating to an additional coverage of around 2%) and ideally that will be done within the existing timescale, which would of course result in coverage that matches the Government’s national target for 95% coverage by 2017.

Sadly the local authority has yet to issue an official press release on the contract signing and thus we don’t yet have the final details, although we can confirm that the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme has contracted the full allocation of £2,860,000 to the final deal and this will need to be matched by the local authority.

We will update again once the official press release is out.