Superfast Cornwall Confirms 85,000 Premises Can Get FTTP Broadband

The Superfast Cornwall project has confirmed that the rural English county continues to have the largest deployment of ultrafast 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology anywhere in the United Kingdom, with the total number of premises passed increasing from 62,000 one year ago to 85,000 now.

Most of BT’s Next Generation Access (NGA) style broadband deployments currently tend to be dominated by the slower and less reliable ‘up to’ 80Mbps hybrid Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service, which is significantly cheaper and faster to deploy because it uses your existing copper telecoms cable between street cabinets and homes.

By comparison FTTP is usually much more expensive and slower to deploy because it runs a pure fibre optic cable all the way to your property and so tends to be avoided by the operator, although Cornwall has proven to be the exception. It’s worth pointing out that Cornwall is a pre-Broadband Delivery UK project and so was jointly funded by £78.5m from BT and up to £53.5m from Europe (ERDF).

So far the Superfast Cornwall scheme has managed to push BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTP/C) network out to 95% of the region, although a new Broadband Delivery UK based contract was signed last week that should put related superfast broadband services within reach of 99% by early 2018 (here). It’s not yet known how much of a part FTTP will play in the new deal.

ISPreview.co.uk understands that the latest progress in Cornwall is due to be highlighted as part of Monday’s BBC Breakfast TV show, which will broadcast live from Tregothna where FTTP is already largely deployed.

But one big bugbear that BTOpenreach has yet to solve is the on-going lack of support among big consumer ISPs, with even BT’s own retail division making it difficult to find their related BTInfinity Option 3 and 4 packages unless you do a specific availability check (this is likely intended to avoid consumer confusion with the dominant FTTC).

Sadly TalkTalk, EE, Sky Broadband and PlusNet similarly do not offer any clear non-trial commercial Openreach FTTP products with ultrafast (100Mbps+) speeds for home users and as the technology expands this will become an increasingly important issue. Meanwhile many of the smaller Openreach FTTP offering ISPs tend to promote less affordable business style connections, which are of little interest to domestic users.