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UPDATE Shropshire UK Agrees BT Fibre Broadband Extension Contract

Friday, May 29th, 2015 (2:12 pm) - Score 843

The £26m Connecting Shropshire project in England’s West Midlands, which is currently working with BT to make “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) connectivity available to 93% of local premises by the end of Spring 2016 (only 87% will get “superfast” 24Mbps+ speeds), has today signed a diminished second contract to extend the roll-out.

As feared the new Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) contract, which forms part of the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme, will be significantly smaller in scope than originally hoped. Last year BDUK provisionally allocated £11,380,000 to the scheme, but today’s signing confirms that only £4,725,209 of that has actually been contracted for the Phase 2 extension.

The primary problem for Shropshire County Council (SCC) has been the strain placed upon them by recent budget cuts, which have made it difficult to match fund with the Government’s investment. Thankfully the Marches Local Enterprise Partnership (£5m) has helped to pick up some of the slack, which means today’s deal is worth around £10m in terms of public funding (BT’s contribution has yet to be confirmed).

Earlier this week Patrick Cosgrove, a well-known local broadband campaigner, sent us a copy of a comment he was given by Shropshire Council’s Leader, which echoes some of the challenges they face.

Keith Barrow, Shropshire Council’s Leader, said:

We will continue to explore opportunities for additional funding should the need arise. We are currently concluding our Phase 2 procurement and will then start a process using remaining secured funding to undertake further procurement processes as soon as possible.

It remains a clearly sensible strategy for the authority, at a time of financial constraint, to be clear what the current funding can procure for any remaining unserved areas before we commit additional funds.

All broadband procurements will require us to provide services that meet the national State Aid condition for superfast broadband. The Superfast Broadband criteria will require all deployments to provide a minimum of 24Mbps using whichever technology meets the criteria and provides the best value and coverage.”

So far the existing Phase 1 BDUK contract has already installed around 180 new Street Cabinets (‘up to’ 80Mbps FTTC) in 43 telephone exchange areas, while 34,365 additional homes and businesses have benefitted from the work (service uptake in related areas stands at a strong 16.9%). By completion around 63,000 premises should have benefitted from Phase 1.

Sadly we haven’t yet received the official press release for the BDUK Phase 2 contract, although it’s known from last year’s SCC report that the completion of Phase 1 in 2016 will still leave around 28,500 premises with no access to superfast broadband.

However the tender for Phase 2 will actually focus on just 15,500 of the above total, not least due to the funding restrictions and a hope that BT’s separate commercial deployment might be able to go further than predicted. The expectation is that Phase 2 will push “superfast” coverage to more than 90% by 2017/18 and the raw “fibre broadband” footprint should exceed 95% (includes both 24Mbps+ and slower speeds).

It can normally take anything from a few days to a couple of weeks, after we hear that a new contract has been signed, before the official press release surfaces with the final details. We’ll update again once that arrives.

UPDATE 3rd June 2015

It’s now been confirmed that BT has committed just £900,000 to support the contract (total funding of around £5.6m) and apparently just 4,000 premises will actually benefit. Some of the telephone exchange areas that will see the most work include Montford Bridge, Prees and Munslow.

The good news is that another contract will be developed for the end of 2015, which should hopefully enable the project to use the rest of the public funding that was originally earmarked for Phase 2.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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