Oxfordshire Village Raises £11,000 to Get Superfast BT Broadband

Residents of Islip, a small civil parish village in Oxfordshire (England, UK) with a population of over 600 people, has had a superfast broadband (FTTC) ISP service installed by BTOpenreach after they successfully raised £11,000 to help fund the development.

According to IT Pro, the village is already close to BT’s fibre optic enabled telephone exchange in Kidlington, although without the extra cash it wouldn’t have been economically viable to upgrade under BT’s private £2.5bn roll-out. So, instead of waiting to see whether or not public funding from the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office could help, they went ahead and did it themselves.

Bill Murphy, BT’s MD for Next Generation Access, said:

“We encourage other communities to talk to us about their options. We want to provide fibre speeds to as many people as possible and in many cases local residents can make a real difference in bringing fibre to their area.”

It’s understood that the relevant engineering work is expected to complete in June 2013. However it should be said that £11,000 is almost cheap in BT terms and we’ve seen other areas where the cost of upgrading a street cabinet and related local infrastructure can skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands.

As a side note Thinkbroadband spotted that BT was apparently competing with rival ISP Gigaclear to do the work.