Cheshire UK Council Publish BDUK Superfast Broadband Deployment Map

The £28.5 million Connecting Cheshire project, which aims to make BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network available to “around” 96% of premises across Cheshire, Halton and Warrington, has today become the latest Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) project to publish a roll-out map.

The indicative and typically vague map shows roughly where communities throughout the county can expect the “high-speed technology” to arrive by the end of summer 2015. Overall some 80,000 homes and businesses are expected to be helped, which requires BTOpenreach to build new street cabinets and install 875 miles of fibre optic cable.

As usual the final 4% of premises are marked as “under evaluation” and the project is seeking additional funding from the government (i.e. it’s recently allocated pot of £250m extra to the BDUK scheme for use between 2015 and 2017). In the meantime it also aims to deliver a minimum download speed of 2Mbps+ to all homes and businesses by the end of 2016 via “enhancements to the existing copper network” (12% of locals currently receive less than 2Mbps).

The project expects to announce the first areas to benefit during December 2013, which will initially include “at least 20 telephone exchange areas” as part of the first phase. The first customers are then expected to go live from the end of March 2014 onwards.