East Riding of Yorkshire Suffers GBP10m Broadband Funding Shortfall

The Broadband East Riding project in Yorkshire (England), which is being conducted with support from BT, will need another £10 million of funding if it is to reach the goal of making a superfast broadband (24Mbps+) network available to 95% of local premises.

The original Broadband Delivery UK supported contract, which was worth around £14 million (£4m from BT) and signed all the way back in September 2013, aimed to extend Openreach’s (BT) 24Mbps+ capable FTTC/P network to an additional 42,734 homes and businesses in the region by December 2015.

A second £5.4m extension contract was also signed last June (here), which saw BT commit £400K to the scheme and BDUK doing the rest. The second contract aimed to push the related service out to cover another 4,500 premises, but a new report suggests that even with this support the local area may only achieve 90% coverage and that to hit 95% they’d need to find another £10m.

As it stands only a little over 70% coverage has so far been achieved in the East Riding area.

Andy Elliott, East Riding Council’s ICT Boss, said (Hull Daily Mail):

“The remaining 5 per cent are in the really rural areas, which are also the most expensive in terms of providing the necessary infrastructure. There is an estimated shortfall of about £10m at the moment, which is needed to reach that 95 per cent target. Meeting that shortfall depends on the future commercial plans of BT but we are also lobbying MPs and ministers, as well as having discussions with Chris Townsend, the chief executive of BDUK, over the issue.”

At this point it’s worth remembering that the Government’s 95% coverage target is a national one, which means that some areas may complete with a lower coverage figure than 95% and others will finish with more.

On top of the current work many parts of East Riding, such as around Hull, are also being catered for by KCOM’s commercial roll-out of FTTC/P “fibre broadband” services. However both that and the BT / BDUK project will still leave some rural areas uncovered, which are very expensive to tackle; it’s hard to see these being tackled by BT on a purely commercial basis.

We suspect that the forthcoming 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) and related technologies may ultimately be required to improve connectivity for most of those in the final 5-10% of East Riding, although key issues of cost and connection technology have yet to be resolved. A few may be left with no option but to take a subsidised Satellite service.