UK Gov Boosts Northamptonshire Fibre Broadband Grant to GBP5.5m

The Government’s Broadband Delivery UK office has boosted its funding allocation for Northamptonshire in England from £3.64 million to £5.5 million, which should help an extra 30,000 local homes and businesses to receive access to BT’s faster “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network.

At present the local Superfast Northamptonshire project is worth £16.26m and aims to deliver “full countywide coverage by 2017 at next generation access speeds (30 mbps and above)“, although the current partnership with BT appears to be aiming for the more modest target of around 90% by September 2015 (here). Overall some 53,000 additional premises are expected to benefit.

Earlier this year the Government’s BDUK scheme added to this by announcing a £250m Superfast Extension Programme (here), which allocated an additional £3.64m (indicative) to the county in order to help it achieve the national goal of 95% fixed line superfast broadband coverage by 2017.

But this week the Northamptonshire County Council (NCC) confirmed that it had successfully campaign to have this increased to £5.5m (note: the council and probably also BT will need to match this extra funding) and thus the total number of premises expected to benefit has similarly risen to around 80,000.

Cllr Andre Gonzalez De Savage said:

“This is great news for the people of Northamptonshire as this represents a significant step forward in having total superfast broadband coverage in the county by the end of 2017.

We are becoming more reliant on the internet, particularly for business but also in home life, leisure as well as the provision of services like education and healthcare. In the coming years it will be unthinkable to not have adequate broadband speeds and this project is making sure that we’re ready.

The county council has secured more money from government than we’d hoped for and I’m delighted that we’re in such a strong position in taking forward this project to the next stage.”

Apparently the county council will be investing a further £2m on top of over £4m already committed to their local broadband programme and contributions from the district and borough councils will add to the funding pot. But before all this the council will need to go through the usual procurement programme and the final roll-out plan is then expected to be announced this autumn 2014. It’s likely that BT will once again be selected to help extend the reach via their existing contract.