UPDATE East Riding of Yorkshire UK Signs New Superfast Broadband Deal

The Broadband East Riding project in Yorkshire (England) has signed a new Superfast Extension Programme contract with the government’s Broadband Delivery UK office, which should help the area to meet the goal of putting superfast broadband (24Mbps+) within reach of 95% by 2017.

The original contract, which was first signed in September 2013 and is worth a total investment of £14m (£4m from BT), currently aims to help superfast broadband services reach a further 42,734 local homes and businesses by December 2015 (roughly 90% coverage). Like most of the schemes it also aims to make speeds of at least 2Mbps available to 100% by the same date.

Sadly since then the project has been rather silent and last progress update, which was posted all the way back in February 2015, reported having completed 24,000 of the required total (that would put them more or less on target). Unfortunately the East Riding scheme is one of the less communicative, at least when it comes to progress updates.

At the time of writing little is known about the new phase 2 contract, except that it originally aimed to push coverage out to 95% as required by the Government. The BDUK programme has today also confirmed that the full state aid allocation of £5m is contracted for the latest deal, which will almost certainly involve an extension of BT’s current work.

We will update with the full details once they’ve been released.

UPDATE 20th June 2015

The official announcement confirms that 4,500 premises will benefit from the second contract over the next two years and the total investment comes to £5.4m, with £400k of that coming from BT and the rest from BDUK; no council contributions are noted. Work on this will begin in early 2016.

It’s also noted that 38,000 premises have already been put within reach of the service as part of the on-going project and that under the new contract “Fibre to the Premises [FTTP] technology – delivering speeds of up to 330Mbps – will become available in certain areas.”