The Black Country Slowly Moving Forward with Fibre Broadband Rollout Plan

The Black Country (i.e. stems from a heritage of coal mining and heavy industrialisation), which represents Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton in England’s West Midlands, appears to finally be making progress with their Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) plan to make superfast broadband (25Mbps+) services available to 95% of local premises by 2017. But a supplier still hasn’t been chosen.

The project, which is currently being run by the Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership, is one of the only other BDUK plans outside of South Yorkshire to still be officially classified as “in procurement” by the Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and has missed a number of past deadlines going all the way back to 2012.

Most recently an official Black Country Broadband Plan Consultation was launched in order to determine the target intervention area (i.e. areas that are not expected to get faster broadband via commercial investment), which ran from 20th February and concluded on 20th March 2014.

But it should be stressed that one reason for the slow pace of progress is perhaps because some 93% of local homes and businesses are already expected to gain access to Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband services over the next three years via commercial investment, while just 0.4% are classified as being unable to achieve the Universal Service Commitment (USC) of 2Mbps.

In other words, the Black Country didn’t have a pressing need to jump on the first round of BDUK funding in 2011/12, which originally aimed to achieve a coverage target of 90%. However this changed last year when the government lifted the national goal for fixed line superfast broadband coverage to 95% by 2017.

By our guesstimate, around 70k-80k of local premises (7%) in the Black Country could potentially be eligible for help under the new plan, which will make use of BDUK’s funding via the Superfast Extension Programme.

According to today’s Express & Star, the final BDUK allocation for the scheme has now been agreed as £3 million (less than the £4.99m originally allocated), with another £3 million to come from the Black Country Chamber of Commerce’s Growing Places fund and a final £1.5 million expected to be provided by the chosen supplier (total £7.5 million).

Apparently the legal and financial responsibility for setting up the new network has now been handed over to Sandwell Council, which has yet to choose a supplier. However, much like all other BDUK projects, it’s highly likely that BT will be picked; although the extension programme does potentially offer some flexibility. An announcement on the preferred bidder is expected within the next few months.