10821 UK Premises Covered Per £Million of Superfast Broadband Funding

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has a published short performance report on the progress of their national £1.2bn Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme, which claims that 10,821 premises have been covered by BT’s FTTC/P based superfast broadband (25Mbps+) network per £million of public funding (up to the end of September 2013).

The Government hopes to expand fixed line superfast broadband to reach around 90% of homes and businesses by the end of 2015 and then 95% in 2017 (99% by 2018 when you include mobile broadband and wireless solutions).

The latest data shows that BDUK has helped to connect 111,968 homes and businesses to superfast broadband by the end of September 2013. Take note that this specifically excludes non-superfast premises that have benefitted from BDUK funding but which still cannot achieve speeds of greater than 24Mbps.

Yesterday’s National Infrastructure Plan update (here) also revealed that the public funded roll-out of superfast broadband had reached over 140,000 premises so far, with 10,000 additional premises being passed per week; this is based on the most recent late October 2013 figures (set to reach 25,000 per week by spring 2014 and 40,000 by summer 2014).

Both Point Topic and Ofcom suggest that the current level of superfast broadband coverage across the United Kingdom is already hovering around the 75% mark (population), which is largely thanks to Virgin Media’s on-going cable speed upgrades and BT having made their own “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network available to 17 million UK homes and businesses (this is all predominantly commercial investment – BDUK has yet to have a big impact but it is ramping up quite fast).

Meanwhile 42 out of 44 local broadband (BDUK) projects have now completed their procurements and the final two projects are due to complete procurement before the end of 2013.