2,000 Extra Premises in South Gloucestershire to Get Superfast Broadband

The South Gloucestershire Council in England has confirmed that an extra investment of £1.49m is being made into their Phase 2 Superfast Extension Programme, which will work with BT (Openreach) to expand FTTC/P based superfast broadband (24Mbps+) to 95-97% of the region by Dec 2017.

Apparently more than 2,000 extra homes and businesses will be covered by this latest deployment, which comes from a total pot of £4.39 million that has been set aside to deliver additional coverage for the region via the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, as well as the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership and BT clawback / gainshare (i.e. public investment that has been returned by BT as a result of high take-up from the original 2013 phase 1 roll-out).

The remaining £2.9m is to be separately invested through an Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) procurement (details), which is expected to take 3-6 months to complete and thus won’t be ready to begin until the very end of this year or early 2017.

As for the £1.49m extension project with BT, the first surveys are now being undertaken to confirm exactly where the work will be carried out and some of the initial locations (villages) to benefit could include: Tytherington, Dyrham, Hinton, Littteton-Upon-Severn, Oldbury-on-Severn, Cromhall, Elberton, Codrington and Little Sodbury.

Councillor John Goddard, Chair of Resources Sub-Committee, said:

“More than 2,000 homes and businesses are set to benefit from the latest investment in the rollout of fibre broadband, and I’m pleased to say that most of the areas which will now be surveyed are in some of our more rural village locations in South Gloucestershire.”

The existing partnership between South Gloucestershire Council, BDUK and BT already claims to have made faster “fibre broadband” services available to over 18,000 homes and businesses across the district since 2013, while the new investment should take superfast broadband coverage from above 93% now to 95%. However the local authority actually expects the total funding to exceed this target and deliver 97% by completion, which looks to be very viable.