BT Begin £3m State Aid BDUK Superfast Broadband Rollout in Rutland UK

The Rutland County Council (RCC) in England has today confirmed that the first community (village) to get access to BT’s new superfast broadband (FTTC/P) service through its publicly funded £3 million Digital Rutland project is North Luffenham.

It’s understood that around 200 local homes and businesses are now being served by BT’s new network and more are expected to follow over the next few months. The Digital Rutland scheme was one of the first Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) projects to be signed last May 2012 (here) and it also has one of the nearest completion targets.

Under the plan BT has pledged to make broadband speeds of up to 80Mbps (Megabits per second) available to over 90% of Rutland’s (England, UK) 17,000 homes and businesses by the end of 2013. As part of the effort all 10 of Rutland’s local telephone exchanges will need to be upgraded.

The council are also intending to roll-out fibre optic broadband to a further 7% of the county within the same timescale by using “additional sources of funding”. The total project cost is thus likely to reach almost £4m and about a quarter of that is coming from BT (£800,000), with the rest from public funding.

Roger Begy, Leader of Rutland County Council, said:

“North Luffenham is not only the first Rutland community to receive superfast broadband under our project, but also the first in the East Midlands to do so using funding from the government’s rural broadband scheme. We live in an extremely rural area and the importance of providing access to high speed broadband for our residents and businesses should not be underestimated.”

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

“It is a fantastic achievement that people in Rutland are already seeing the benefits of this programme. This investment in fibre broadband will boost the local economy and help to create or protect local jobs both in communities like North Luffenham village and across the whole of Rutland. It will be of enormous benefit to local businesses which can use the faster speeds to improve their competitiveness both within the UK and abroad.”

As usual BT will deploy a mix of 80Mbps capable FTTC and 330Mbps FTTP technologies to the area. However the more ‘hard to reach’ properties, such as isolated farmhouses or rural premises, can expect to receive at least 2Mbps and some of this work may involve alternative technologies during early 2014.