Telford and Wrekin UK Begin Local Superfast Broadband Rollout Project

The Superfast Telford project in Shropshire (England) has officially launched today, which follows last year’s signing of a new state aid supported £5.6m contract with BT (here) that aims to extend superfast broadband (24Mbps+) services to reach 98% of local homes and businesses by the end of 2017.

The Telford and Wrekin Council sat out the Government’s first Broadband Delivery UK phase (90% target), not least because they already benefitted from good superfast broadband coverage. But this changed last year when the Superfast Extension Programme (phase 2) raised the coverage target to 95% and enticed the borough to re-join.

As a result of that the council ended up committing an investment of £2 million to the scheme, which was supported by £1.6 million from BT and another £2 million from BDUK. Overall some 9,300 homes and businesses are expected to benefit when BT begins to expand the local coverage of their ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) services (330Mbps FTTP may also play a tiny role).

Happily we can today reveal that the first communities to benefit from this project will be Dawley, Oakengates and Great Bolas. Openreach intends to begin the process of surveying these areas in the autumn and then the first construction work is set to start at the end of 2015, with the first premises going live during spring 2016.

Apparently Openreach will need to use 430km of sub duct and new fibre optic cable in the deployment, although it’s not clear how many street cabinets will need to be built.

Councillor Shaun Davies, Cabinet Member for Customer Services, said:

“Today was a fantastic opportunity to tell the story of Telford’s journey to delivering superfast broadband and building a fibre network that is future proofed for generations to come.

I am delighted by how many attended, representing a whole range of organisations and individuals including local town and parish council representatives and key members of our local business community.

We’re absolutely committed to improving high speed coverage for our residents and businesses and this is the first big step towards 98 per cent of our borough becoming superfast.”

The project already has a reasonable coverage map available and hopefully the council will add an information key to help clarify the different colour coding for these areas / phases (we can guess at what they mean, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to).