BDUK Confirm Extra 3.62m UK Premises Can Get Superfast Broadband

The Government’s Broadband Deliver UK programme has today published its latest quarterly performance report to the end of 2015, which reveals a bit more detail about the project’s progress. Overall 3,625,369 extra premises have now benefited and can order superfast broadband, with £406,918,848 of BDUK funding spent.

The premises passed figure isn’t especially big news because the Government already announced a headline of 3.5 million at the tail end of last year (here) and the next major BDUK progress announcement might not occur until around March / April 2016, which is roughly when we’re expecting the first 90% UK coverage target for superfast broadband (24Mbps+) availability to be hit.

In the meantime we do at least have the latest performance update, which offers some additional context to those figures. Take note that the following figures exclude other major sources of public funding (councils, EU etc.) and BT / telecoms based investment, thus at present it’s only reflective of the first £530m that was allocated by the Government to BDUK Phase 1 (90% target); most of that was extracted from the BBC TV Licence Fee.

The premises passed figure used below also only reflects those able to receive superfast speeds of greater than 24Mbps. Sadly the Government do not provide an additional column in order to show the overall premises passed total, such as to include those premises receiving sub-24Mbps speeds via the new infrastructure.

Broadly speaking the project’s progress has been reasonably good, although we note that the number of additional premises passed (coverage) in Q4 2015 comes out as +313,526, which is lower than the +406,079 added in Q3 2015.

However this does not come as a surprise because we always expected that the progress would slow down as BT’s engineers (Openreach) started to focus on connecting smaller and more rural communities, which cost more to tackle and take longer to connect.

It’s also important to note that the headline figures here are said to be cash based (i.e. when grants are made or budgets transferred). However on an accruals basis, which matches costs incurred to the timing of delivery, cumulative BDUK expenditure to end-December 2015 has been estimated as £442,599,025 and that equates to 8,191 premises covered per £million of BDUK expenditure (expenditure is higher for this because the work is said to have been delivered in advance of payment).

Separately we’ve also managed to extract a rough regional breakdown of what today’s total means for different parts of the United Kingdom; although this uses a slightly older data set than the table above and so the total will be lower than 3.625m.

Rough Regional Breakdown (Premises Passed)
North East England: More than 113,000
Yorkshire and the Humber: Almost 440,000
North West England: More than 360,000
Midlands: More than 490,000
South East England: Almost 450,000
South West England: More than 290,000
East of England: Almost 460,000

Devolved Administrations:
Scotland: Around 500,000
Northern Ireland: Around 20,000
Wales: Around 500,000