Broadband Delivery UK Progress as Cheshire Reaches Half-Way Point

The £28.5m Connecting Cheshire project in England has become the latest Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme to reach the half-way mark after it announced that 40,000 additional local homes and businesses had now been connected to BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network, which aims to reach 96% of premises across the region by the end of summer 2015.

Apparently BTOpenreach’s engineers have so far installed more than 200 new FTTC based roadside street cabinets and laid around 400 kilometres of fibre optic cable. As a result the areas now able to access BT’s “fibre broadband” network include:

Cheshire East – Alderley Edge, Disley, Poynton, Plumley and Sutton.
Cheshire West – Burton, Keslall, Kingsley, Sandiway and Weaverham.
Halton – Hale, Sandymoor, Manor Park and Widnes.
Warrington – Westbrook, Whittle Hall and Padgate.

Overall around 400,000 premises will have access to faster broadband speeds (between 2Mbps and 80Mbps) by the end of 2015 (note: this includes separate commercial work by BT and Virgin Media etc.), although unfortunately it remains unclear what proportion of those can expect to receive so-called “superfast broadband” speeds of greater than 24Mbps.

Going forward Cheshire has also been allocated additional funding from BDUK, which should be enough to push “fibre broadband” coverage up to 99% by 2017. Ordinarily we wouldn’t post mini BDUK project updates like this, but Cheshire hasn’t furnish us with any phased roll-out announcements since December 2013 and so we’ll take what we can.