Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire Finish First “Fibre Broadband” Rollout
The joint £18.06m Connected Counties project, which involves Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire in England, appears to have reached its original Phase One contract goal of 90% “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) coverage (an additional 60,000+ premises passed) thanks to its work with BT.
Overall the effort has built around 320 new street cabinets to support BTOpenreach’s up to 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL) technology and over 260km of new fibre optic spine cable has also been laid across the two counties, with a little ultrafast FTTP being used in a few locations.
Elsewhere the Hertfordshire side of the project has already signed a Phase 2 Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) contract, which aims to ensure that the new FTTC network is extended to reach 95% of the county by September 2017 and then “over” 98% by the end of June 2018 (here); this should add another 46,000 premises to the coverage total.
The roll-out of Hertfordshire’s Phase 2 contract has already started (a big focus will be on East Herts, including Puckeridge and Buntingford) and meanwhile Buckinghamshire is currently working on the details of their future Phase 2 roll-out, which should be announced fairly soon.
As usual there’s a slight question mark over whether or not the first 90% “fibre broadband” goal is referencing “superfast” (24Mbps+) speeds or merely the full FTTC/P coverage footprint, which can also include sub-24Mbps speeds. But the data from Thinkbroadband’s independent checking appears to suggest that the joint 90% goal is roughly representative of 24Mbps+ availability (it falls a bit below 90% in Bucks, but is a bit higher in Herts).
The local authorities probably won’t make this announcement official for a few more weeks as the PR spin tends to lag a little behind. On top of that there’s still a small bit of work left to do under contract one (likely to push a little beyond 90% by full completion), but in general the combined 90% coverage goal appears to have been met on schedule.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Good to see availability of fibre broadband continuing to increase, let’s hope more people decide to use it to make the public expenditure worthwhile (and to hopefully generate gainshare / clawback monies to push coverage even further).