Cumbria Council Reclassifies 146 Postcodes for State Aid Broadband Rollout

The Cumbria Council has quietly reclassified 146 postcodes for inclusion into their Connecting Cumbria project with BT after they were originally left out due to a conflict over the commercial coverage of Solway’s wireless broadband network, which meant they weren’t eligible for state aid support.

At present the state aid supported project is working hard to roll-out “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services to reach 95% of premises in the county by around mid-2018, most of which are being delivered by the expansion of FTTC and a few FTTP services via Openreach’s (BT) national network. So far nearly 90% of local homes and businesses have already been covered.

However when the original Phase 2 Intervention Area map was published in late 2015 many local people noticed that large areas had been excluded from potential improvements because of claims that a local alternative network provider, Solway Communications, already provided a “superfast” service. Readers may recall that we wrote several related articles on this in 2016 (examples here and here).

Solway typically runs a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network and they do have a 30Mbps option on their website, although quite a few locals of the affected areas found that they were either shielded from a line of sight view of one of Solway’s masts, or they could not buy a connection fast enough to be termed “superfast“.

The EU’s State Aid rules limit the use of public funding in situations where there is a risk of overbuilding another “superfast” capable network. However this didn’t stop locals from launching a 15 month campaign to correct the de-scoping of their areas and include them back into the Connecting Cumbria deployment, which also won the support of both the Hayton Parish Council and local MP Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border).

The good news is that the areas have now been included back into the project.

Connecting Cumbria Statement

In 2015 Cumbria County Council’s public consultation, which sought to identify areas which do not have Next Generation (NGA) broadband infrastructure or where there are no plans to provide such infrastructure over the next three years, closed and state aid Intervention Area was set for the Connecting Cumbria programme. Further to this evidence has emerged that NGA services are not available in a number of postcodes where coverage had been claimed during the public consultation.

Following conclusion of our consultation, conducted between 16th January and 13th February 2017, we can confirm that suitable evidence has been put forward to confirm NGA service availability in the 146 postcodes considered for reclassification as NGA white. On the basis of this Cumbria County Council and Broadband Delivery UK have concluded that NGA services are not available in these postcodes and they should now be reclassified as NGA White thus becoming eligible for publicly funded intervention under the Connecting Cumbria programme.

The bad news is that re-adding the areas back into the scheme will not automatically see them being upgraded, more investment will be required. As Connecting Cumbria explains, “a postcode becoming NGA White does not guarantee that NGA broadband deployment activity will be undertaken … [we will] continue to work as efficiently as possible to reach as many properties as we can across Cumbria with available funding.”

However Cumbria has yet to announce how they will spend the reinvestment from clawback (public investment that BT returns as a result of high take-up) and this could provide an opportunity to target at least some of the previously overlooked areas. Speaking of which..