BT Agree £14m Superfast Broadband Rollout in East Riding of Yorkshire
The East Riding of Yorkshire Council (ERYC) in England has today agreed to a new state aid supported £14 million rollout of superfast broadband (25Mbps+) services to a further 42,734 local rural homes and businesses by December 2015.
The Broadband East Riding Project is to be funded by £4 million from BT and around £5.5 million from the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office, while the rest will come from the ERYC and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Bill Murphy, BTs MD of for Next Generation Access, said:
“The East Riding of Yorkshire is a largely rural county and we know that small businesses form a key part of the local economy in rural areas.
Faster broadband breaks down the barriers to doing business in the digital world like online trading, which helps to empower small businesses to find new markets, sell new products, try new models and compete on an equal footing with larger businesses.
This project is vital to the future economic strength of the whole of East Riding. It will go beyond BT’s and other suppliers’ commercial roll-outs of fibre broadband and take faster broadband to areas which are technically and economically more challenging.”
BTOpenreach will now begin its engineering survey and the first communities are then expected to be connected during summer 2014. Most of the deployment will make use of BT’s up to 80Mbps capable FTTC technology and some 330Mbps FTTP.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Isn’t 30+ Mb what ‘superfast’ is defined as now?
Ofcom and the EU define it as 30Mbps but the government are still sticking to “greater than 24 Mbps”.
That explains it thanks Mark, more we hear about BDUK the bigger a cluster …. it sounds.
Of these VDSL lines, around 22% will be slower than then 30mbps superfast, and around 50% won’t get more than 40mbps. Only about 15% will get faster than 80mbps. And then there will be also quite a few EO lines for which BT hasn’t even worked out a general strategy yet (the EO lines issue appears to be a problem unique to the UK, I never seen it in other countries).
Quite a long way to go to meet EU targets!
@JNeuhoff
Interesting predictions for FTTC performance, how do you explain the much higher figures in the latest Ofcom report? Have have you factored in the FTTP lines in the contracts in your predictions?
We know you’d prefer FTTP, how would you fund it? Fujitsu was meant to providing FTTP but has walked, I can’t see anyone else rushing forward with money.
The laughably-named “FTTH Council of Europe” doesn’t like the fact that FTTC is being rolled out across an increasing % of Europe, hasn’t really offered an answer to the cost differential either – oh wait, it’s really just the FTTP kit manufacturers! Even Australia is re-thinking its plan given the snail-like pace of deployment.
Perhaps the technology purists need to consider the economics, or are you all just assuming “someone else” will pay?
PS those so-called EU targets are irrelevant. There is nothing behind them in terms of budget, so IMHO the Commission hasn’t really got any right to comment on what the free-market is investing in. It would be better off sorting out the mess that is its budget, get to the point where its auditors pass the accounts for a change, perhaps stop wasting billions of our money on farmers!
“…perhaps stop wasting billions of our money on farmers!”
Yes because none of us need meat, eggs, milk, fruit or veg but we all need BT FTTC complete with DLM
:rolleyes:
Hmmm its a fair point though, ploughing endless cash into a sector that can’t support itself (farming)
Its obviously a complex issue and I for one would never like to see our farming industry die off but it can’t be right just subbing an industry for ever, to get it back on its feet to be in a shape to compete sure, but an endless flow of money? No.
And governments of the world should instead plough (pun intended) billions into any organisation that is already making profit of millions quite happily and providing a product which less than two-thirds of the country use (IE broadband)?
You have a funny idea about what a government subsidy should be for.
Also unless i am mistaken a lot (NOT all) of farming grants (depending on which pile of cash/system it is) have to be paid back. When are BT paying back what has been taken from my pocket again?
Roberts
Read up on the CAP next time. A lot of it is used to maintain high prices for us consumers, so we pay the subsidy AND high prices! Not a good deal, especially at the expense of third world farmers.
Nope not saying money should be given to any telco (wasn’t just open to BT) just looking at farming funding in its own right, no comparison to anything else.
@New_Londoner re-read my post to Fibrefred rather than focusing on a singular scheme.
@FibreFred Your argument was at least far more sensible. New_Londoner we should not fund farming here at all. Imagine how much worse prices would be if this country had no farming industry at all. No more cheap strawberries each summer, potatoes which would cost an absolute fortune compared to what they currently do and us all back to having a Milkman as the supermarkets would decided importing the stuff wouldn’t make enough margin. You only have to look at prices of Meat when this country had its foot and mouth and Madcow/BSE issues.
To stop subsidising farming is a stupid idea. Especially when arguing it leads to high prices. The broadband sector he would like to give more billions to and its products (NOT only from BT but any superfast product) are the highest priced services ever.
BT Group’s consumer revenue reached £4,449m in the Q2 2013, and their reported operating profits topped £659m. Hence, BT is anything but a poor charity, so there is no need to give BT so much taxpayer’s money via e.g. the BDUK in exchange for no ROI.
FTTC has been proven to be an unviable and ineffective technology for rural areas – that’s why BT won’t invest their own money into it without massive state aid. Rural areas need to be served via alternative technologies, e.g. long-distance wireless broadband services. Alternatively, stricter regulations could be enforced upon BT if broadband services are to be regarded as essential utilities, so as to avoid excessive cherry picking of areas served by NGA broadband.
I suspect that both BDUK and EU agricultural policy show how you need to be wary of subsidy. In both cases I suspect it has as much, if not more, to do with politics (=votes) as economics. And the consumer pays. Not least of the problems are the cost of administration and the suspicions that commercial behaviour is modified to maximise subsidy and becomes less efficient as a result, with less innovation. I’d prefer to see local solutions but the national and supra-national authorities would, I suspect, never allow that. It’s about power (politics).
BT is laying fibre optic cable on the footpath from the exchange to the nearby cabinet box below:
http://postimg.org/image/orkt6w337
http://postimg.org/image/6aqeg2n4z
unless we get BT to listen we will always be behind. This is bad for our local economy. I found the website http://holmeuponspaldingmoor.co.uk has a link to register interest with BT. It works for any area. Do it now don’t hesitate!