Cumbria UK Reveals Tentative £51m BT Superfast Broadband Rollout Plan

The £51m Connecting Cumbria project, which will use a mix of public and private funding to help expand the reach of BT’s superfast fibre broadband (FTTC/P) services to over 93% of the English county by the end of 2015 (last 7% to get at least 2Mbps), has detailed its preliminary telephone exchange upgrade plan.

The contract, which was first signed last November (here), is funded by £17.1m from the government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office, £13.7m from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and £15m from BT. Sadly the scheme then had to wait half a year for Europe to give it the final stage of Major Projects Approval (here).

Happily we now know that the first locations (Tranche / Phase 1) to benefit from the upgrades will include Carlisle, Penrith, Maryport, Workington, Dalton-in-Furness and Ulverston by 31st December 2013.

But upgrading exchanges is only part of the battle as BT’s up to 80Mbps FTTC technology will also require hundreds of local street cabinets to either be replaced/upgraded or new ones installed and this can often take several months to complete.

The next phase 2 exchange upgrades are expected to commence from early next year and are still subject to “detailed design work” that could impact on the planned launch dates/cabinet coverage. Meanwhile phase 3 exchanges do not yet have any associated dates and the “under evaluation” ones after that have yet to be surveyed by a BTOpenreach engineer.