RCBF Grants £300k to Boost BT FTTC Broadband in Redcar and Cleveland

The Government’s £20m Rural Community Broadband Fund (RCBF) has awarded another grant of £300,000 to help boost BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC) coverage in the rural North Yorkshire (England) borough of Redcar and Cleveland (specifically East Cleveland).

The new grant will effectively be merged into the existing contribution from BT (£170k) and the Broadband Delivery UK office (£260k – this was also matched by the local council), which means that a total of £990,000 will now be available to improve FTTC broadband availability in the area.

According to the Northern Echo, the new funding means that 93% of Redcar and Cleveland should now gain access to a superfast broadband (25Mbps+) service by 2016 and the remaining areas will receive at least 2Mbps (note: the Northern Echo calls this “2MB/s” but of course it’s actually Megabits and NOT MegaBytes).

Christopher Massey, Council Member for Environment and Rural Affairs, said:

“As part of the bidding process we asked people in east Cleveland to register their interest in the scheme, to help build the borough’s case. There was a fantastic response with as many as 90 per cent of people supporting the bid in some areas. This support was crucial to the success of the bid.”

It should be said that Redcar and Cleveland aren’t the first to link an RCBF grant into their primary BDUK scheme, with the Digital Durham and Tees Valley project in North East England recently opting to do the same (here).

Meanwhile many smaller ISP (altnet) projects continue to struggle to secure a grant, not least with the issue of identifying whether or not their own schemes conflict with the BT/BDUK plan. Sadly gaining access to the BT/BDUK coverage data, which is necessary to satisfy the state aid rules, remains a problem area for many altnets and means that alternatives to the BT/BDUK model can face significant delays.