Worcestershire Benefits from BT GBP3m Fibre Broadband Reinvestment

The Superfast Worcestershire project in England has confirmed that even more premises will soon gain access to BT’s “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network thanks to a reinvestment boost of £2.1m due to stronger than expected take-up. A further £0.9m will also come from deployment “savings“.

At present the existing scheme is already working to make the service available to 90% of local premises by June 2016 (55,000 additional premises) and a second contract will later push this out to 95% by summer 2018 (note: 94% should be able to receive “superfast” 24Mbps+ speeds), which equates to an extra 8,000 homes and businesses.

So far over 35,000 extra homes and businesses in the county have already been upgraded by the Broadband Delivery UK based programme and today’s confirmation of further funding will surely help to push the service deeper into rural Worcestershire.

Simon Geraghty, Worcestershire County Council Cabinet Member, said:

“It is very pleasing to see that the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme and BT have recognised the success of the programme in Worcestershire. It is important that we continue to focus on stimulating demand for the service and ensuring residents and businesses are aware they need to ‘sign-up’ when fibre reaches their area in order to benefit from improved speeds. The investment of a further £3 million could mean that we can now look to reach even more premises and roll-out faster broadband more quickly.”

It’s worth pointing out that the £2.1m aspect of this latest boost has been found as a result of the clawback (gain share) mechanism, which requires BT to return part of the investment when take-up of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark (this is currently said to be worth up to £129m across the United Kingdom). The council states that local take-up is already beyond 17% and they’re currently considering which areas will benefit from the reinvestment.

Meanwhile the deployment savings tend to come from a combination of things, such as using more FTTC instead of FTTP (i.e. FTTC is cheaper and faster to deploy, but slower and less reliable than FTTP) and or finding more efficient approaches to rolling the technology itself out, such as micro-trenching and running fibre optic cables overhead (e.g. telegraph poles) instead of digging up roads.