UPDATE Nottinghamshire UK and BT Sign Extended “Fibre Broadband” Rollout

As expected the Better Broadband for Nottinghamshire project in England will soon be extended, putting “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) connectivity within reach of thousands more homes and businesses, after the local authority officially signed a Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) contract with BT.

The current Phase 1 project is already working to make related broadband services available to 95% of local premises by the end of March 2016, which will benefit an additional 52,000 premises via 400 new roadside street cabinets and 1 million metres of new fibre optic cable.

So far more than 42,000 premises have already been completed, although uptake in related areas is low at 5.4% (Dec 2014).

Phase 1 – Projected District-by-District “Fibre Broadband” Availability
• Ashfield – 97.2% coverage (54,167 homes and businesses)
• Bassetlaw – 88.1% coverage (46,556 homes and businesses)
• Broxtowe – 97.6% coverage (50,367 homes and businesses)
• Gedling – 98.4% coverage (52,320 homes and businesses)
• Mansfield – 97.7% coverage (49,077 homes and businesses)
• Newark and Sherwood – 88.8% coverage (48,358 homes and businesses)
• Rushcliffe – 92.1% coverage (45.527 homes and businesses)

But if the original proposal for today’s Broadband Delivery UK based SEP contract is still relevant then this coverage will now be expanded to 97% by 2018. The Phase 2 contract would naturally target more rural areas, such as those in the districts of Bassetlaw, Newark and Sherwood and Rushcliffe where availability is not as high as it could be.

Predictably it’s unclear precisely how many of the planned 97% will actually receive the Government’s required “superfast” download speeds of at least 24Mbps+, although it will most likely come close to the official 95% target for 2017.

In terms of funding, BDUK originally allocated £3.35m to Nottinghamshire’s Phase 2 extension, although today’s contract will only use £2.63m of this figure (councils are having to make cuts and so finding extra investment can be difficult) and that will be matched by the D2N2 Local Enterprise Partnership Growth Deal (total public funding of £5.26 million). At the time of writing we do not yet known how much or even if BT will contribute.

As usual the pre-election (purdah) period is still technically being enforced and so we’ll have to wait a little longer before the official press release finds its way out of being held under political lock and key. For now we’ve just put together all the useful info. we could find.

UPDATE 22nd May 2015

The official press release has now surfaced, although it confirms a lot of what we have already said above. The extra details reflect that the new contract will benefit an additional 15,000 premises and be worth a total of £6.3m. By the time the overall rollout is completed, in Spring 2018, more than 80,000 properties will have been covered by BBfN.

The 80k figure is a bit higher than we expected, which is because a second phase of contract two will see Nottinghamshire County Council and BDUK commit a further £1.3m to the programme, thus extending the reach of fibre broadband to a further 2,000 properties and bringing the total to 17,000.

Apparently the extra funding has been earmarked to connect communities in the Bassetlaw and Newark and Sherwood districts, where fibre broadband availability is lowest in the county. In terms of funding, we can now confirm that BT is committing £1m capex.