Isle of Wight Confirms First BT Fibre Broadband Rollout Areas

The Isle of Wight Council, which represents a small island just off England’s central south coast that is home to around 140,000 people, has named the first communities to benefit from their local Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) supported deployment of BT’s superfast broadband (FTTC/P) network.

The project aims to enable around 20,000 homes and businesses in “largely rural parts of the Island” with access to “high speed broadband” and the first communities to benefit as part of Phase One include Shalfleet, Gurnard, Whippingham, Brighstone, Shorwell and Merstone.

Customers should expect to be able to place orders for the new service, in at least some of the above areas, during the summer 2014 period and the entire project aims to be completed during autumn 2015.

It’s interesting to note that the IWC is investing £2.4 million in the project to match the funding provided by the government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme and another £2.7m is to come from BT. This appears to represent a shift from last year’s discussion, which tentatively talked about £3.09 million from BDUK, £3.09 million from the IWC and just £1.56 million coming from BT.

Bill Murphy, BT’s MD of Next Generation Access, said:

“This is great news for the Isle of Wight. BT has committed £2.7 million to build and operate the network across the Isle of Wight for the lifetime of the contract.

Today’s announcement builds on BT’s commercial investment, which has already made fibre broadband available to around 49,000 premises, mainly in the Island’s towns. Faster broadband will also help local businesses grow, attracting inward investment and boosting the local economy.”

Regular readers might recall that the IWC project, which still seems to lack its own website and or even a basic coverage map, was one of the last BDUK schemes to be signed in September 2013 following bitter opposition from local cable operator WightFibre (WightCable) and competition fears (here and here).

In its decision to appoint BT, the IWC Cabinet set out “stringent requirements” to be met in the final contract and to be achieved by September 2015:

– 99% of Island premises to have NGA infrastructure.
– 90% of premises in the intervention area to have immediate access to superfast broadband speeds of 24mbps post project.