4,600 Extra Oxfordshire UK Premises to Benefit from “Fibre Broadband”

A third £5.58m state aid supported contract has been signed with BTOpenreach this week for the county of Oxfordshire (England), which will extend the local availability of superfast capable “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) services to an extra 4,600 homes and business.

The local Better Broadband for Oxfordshire project originally began its life with the aim of extending superfast broadband (24Mbps+) availability to 90% of the county by the end of 2015, which had a total contract value of £25 million (£10m from Oxfordshire County Council, £4m from Broadband Delivery UK and £11m from BT). Today’s announcement states that this goal will be achieved.

In February 2015 a second £5.1 million (Superfast Extension Programme) contract was signed to extend the above programme (£1.2m from BT, £1.95m from BDUK and the rest from local councils), which aims to expand the availability of Openreach’s “fibre broadband” services to an additional 6,500 properties beginning in 2016 (here).

By contrast the third £5.58 million contract extension is being supported by £2 million from the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), £120,000 from the South East Midlands LEP and Cherwell District Council, £168,000 from Oxford City Council, £2.2 million from BDUK and £1.1 million from BT. Some 4,600 properties will benefit.

Councillor Nick Carter, Oxfordshire County Council, said:

“We’re proud to announce that we’re on track to achieve our original goal, set for us back in 2013, of making superfast broadband available to 64,500 homes and businesses across Oxfordshire by the end of 2015, and this has been achieved within our original budget, also agreed in 2013.

But, we’re not stopping there. This additional funding provided by the Government, district and city councils, local enterprise zones and BT is allowing us to bring superfast broadband to even more homes and businesses across Oxfordshire. Our combined investments – over the lifetime of the Better Broadband for Oxfordshire programme – will mean that by the end of 2017, more than 95 per cent of county premises will have access to superfast broadband services.”

Bill Murphy, BT’s Managing Director for Next Gen Access, said:

“Better Broadband for Oxfordshire is a huge engineering programme and the roll-out is going extremely well. As we connect more premises, we’re hearing how people are using the technology in new and exciting ways, whether it’s homeworkers or small businesses sharing large amounts of information with their customers and suppliers, or families needing to connect to the internet with different devices at the same time – everything is easier, quicker and better with fibre broadband.”

The precise details and time-scales are still a little unclear, although the project claims that with this third deal they should be able to ensure that “superfast fibre broadband will be increased to more than 95 per cent” (coverage of the county).

Initial surveying work is set to begin immediately and the deployment phases usually follow a few months further down the road, which suggests that contract 2 and 3 will be conducted over a similar period of time.