Fibre GarDen FTTP Broadband Rollout Begins for Garsdale and Dentdale

After a few last minutes problems the community co-operative Digital Dales (Fibre GarDen) project has officially started the build-phase for their new 100Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network, which will serve 580 premises in the rural villages of Garsdale and Dentdale (Cumbria, England).

The project, which is costing around £650,000 to deploy, successfully secured the necessary funding last summer (here), although since then it has suffered some issues with capacity suppliers (Network Rail denied them access and so an alternative had to be found) and concerns over its viability (here). Thankfully all of those problems have since been overcome and the deployment is finally proceeding.

Apparently the ITS Technology Group began laying the first sections of fibre optic cable last week, which routed the cable from the outskirts of Sedbergh, across to Long Rigg on the Millthrop road, under the road and well on the way to Benson Bank on the A684 Garsdale road; when complete the network will stretch to 64km.

But initially the goal is to create a bridge between the two dales from which the 29,000 metres of “carefully planned and designed network” will run from, although there will be plenty of tricky terrain to negotiate along the way.

At present it’s anticipated that the first properties should be able to access the new services by this summer 2015 and we’ll be keeping an eye on its progress.