West Yorkshire and BT Complete BDUK Phase 1 Fibre Broadband Rollout

The Superfast West Yorkshire project in England has today announced that 97% of local premises can now access a “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) service from BT, which means that the first deployment contract has completed ahead of its original end of September 2015 goal.

According to the PR spin, almost 65,000 additional local homes and businesses have now benefitted from the Broadband Delivery UK supported project and this is said to exceed the 64,500 premises originally planned for the first phase. But confusingly their website has been saying for several months that the target was a “final project total of 80,000.”

However it was revealed in June 2015 that a further 28,000 premises, which is on top of today’s total, would benefit from an expanded roll-out as part of the new Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) contract (here). The second BDUK contract, which is supported by £6.89m from BDUK and £6.1m from BT, will ensure that the area achieves 98% coverage of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) by the end of 2018.

Ian Gray, Chair of the Superfast West Yorkshire Project Board, said:

“It is great to have passed the finish line on this first phase of the project, and to have delivered above target, reaching almost 65,000 homes and businesses. The programme has achieved its target ahead of our final contract date, which puts us in a good position when moving on to look at the infrastructure for the second phase of the roll-out.

Delivering superfast broadband to more parts of West Yorkshire and York is essential to equip our businesses and residents with the necessary technology of everyday life.”

As ever the 97% figure will vary between West Yorkshire’s different regions and we suspect that the figure for coverage of “superfast” (24Mbps+) speeds will be just a few percentage points lower, albeit a little above the Government’s first goal of 90% coverage for early 2016. Suffice to say that West Yorkshire now has some fairly strong coverage of faster broadband. Mind you anybody living in the final few percent will still be frustrated until the gaps are closed, but at least they seem to be further ahead than other counties.