BT Helped by £24.5m Northern Ireland Broadband Improvement Project

The Northern Ireland Executive (NIE) has announced a £24.5m project, which is part funded by BT and the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme, to make faster Internet speeds available to over 45,000 of the regions most remote rural homes and business premises by December 2015.

Until now Northern Ireland hasn’t really had to worry much about achieving the national UK superfast broadband coverage target of 95% by 2017 because, according to Ofcom at least, 96% already have access to a Next Generation Access (NGA) network (e.g. BT, Virgin Media etc.).

But this coverage figure drops to 91% in rural areas and they often consist of sparse communities, which are very expensive to serve. As a result the new scheme aims to fill many of those gaps, with £9.9m coming from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment (DETI), £5m from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (DARD), £4.4m from BDUK and then £4.2m from BT.

Arlene Foster, Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister, said:

“I have consistently lobbied for additional investment from both government and telecoms providers to ensure higher speed broadband services are delivered as widely as possible. As we work to try and reach rural areas, the costs to improve services increase significantly so we need to ensure resources are used carefully.

Today’s announcement is great news for Northern Ireland. It is another significant step in making broadband services more widely available to our citizens irrespective of where they live or operate their business. I sought and I have gained an assurance from BT that these improvements will be completed by December 2015 so that consumers and businesses will benefit from the investment as quickly as possible.”

As usual BTOpenreach will now begin an “extensive survey and design process” in order to finalise their roll-out plan, which is expected to take several months to complete before they can begin “re-engineering the network, which was designed for telephone calls, and changing it into a fibre rich, open access network“.

We expect the usual mix of up to 80Mbps capable FTTC lines and some 330Mbps FTTP to be used in the deployment. However some people might rightly question why so much money is being injected into Northern Ireland when there are other parts of the UK that will struggle to get even close to the national 95% target.

Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this news, which seems to have been widely overlooked.