Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Confirm GBP5.3m Broadband Boost

The Connecting Cambridgeshire project in England has today become the latest Broadband Delivery UK scheme to confirm that BT will return £5.3 million through clawback to be reinvested in improved coverage of superfast broadband (24Mbps+) connectivity.

At present the existing scheme aims to make superfast broadband (FTTC/P) connectivity available to 90% of premises in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough by the end of 2015 (98% if you just use the raw “fibre broadband” footprint, including sub-24Mbps speeds) and at that point it should have benefitted 97,000 extra homes and businesses.

So far 83,000 of this goal has already been completed (273,000 if you include BT’s separate commercial deployments) and today we learn that local take-up in BDUK and BT enabled areas has also hit 24%.

This is an important development because the clawback (gain share) mechanism requires BT to return part of the investment when take-up of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark (currently worth up to £129m across the United Kingdom). It’s now been confirmed that Cambridgeshire and Peterborough’s share of this will be £5.3 million.

Cambridgeshire County Councillor, Ian Bates, said:

“The importance of Connecting Cambridgeshire bringing high speed broadband to our communities and the value to the local economy is clear as the roll-out progresses. We are committed to connecting as many places as possible and there is still more to do to find the best solutions for more challenging areas. We welcome the opportunity to reinvest over £5million in the project and will be working with BT to plan how it can be used to extend coverage, targeting many of those properties in hard to reach places.”

Planning is now underway to extend the rollout further using additional funding from the Government’s Superfast Extension Programme (SEP), which follows the signing of a directly related contract with BT in April 2015 (here). BDUK has already committed £1.5 million to the second contract, although we’re still waiting to learn precisely what sort of coverage improvement will be delivered by the deal.