Q3 2016 – BDUK Push Superfast Broadband to 4.17 Million UK Premises

The Government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme has posted its latest progress update to 30th September 2016, which reveals that some 4,168,739 additional premises in the United Kingdom can now access a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) service as a result of a £1.6bn public investment.

At present it’s estimated that fixed line superfast broadband connectivity can reach roughly 91% of homes and businesses in the UK. Phase Two of the current BDUK scheme aims to push this to 95% by 2017/18, before possibly rising to around 97-98% by 2019. The rest are likely to be catered for by alternative networks and the 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), which is still being designed (here and here).

It’s important to note that, prior to BDUK, the commercial market (purely private investment) had already enabled operators like BT and Virgin Media to expand the reach of superfast Internet services to around 70% of the UK. Sadly those ISPs they were either slow or unwilling to invest in upgrading the final “not commercially viable” 30% and so the state aid fuelled BDUK project was born.

Latest Q3 2016 Progress Report

The “premises passed” figure used below only reflects those able to order “superfast” speeds of 24Mbps+ thanks to the BDUK project, it also only reflects state aid via BDUK and does not factor match-funding from local councils, EU and other public or even private sources. Sadly BDUK does not provide an additional column for the overall premises passed total (i.e. including sub-24Mbps areas).

Otherwise the headline figures used below are said to be cash based (i.e. when grants are made or budgets transferred). But on an accruals basis, which matches costs incurred to the timing of delivery, cumulative BDUK expenditure to end-September 2016 has been estimated as £528,922,093 and that equates to 7,882 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).

The roll-out pace has slowed somewhat since the early years, although this is an expected outcome of the fact that the programme is now concentrating on the most challenging rural and some tedious sub-urban locations (e.g. Exchange Only Lines). Related areas take longer to reach (per property), often cost more and deliver fewer premises passed.

So far most of BDUK’s Phase One (90% of the UK) and Phase Two (95% of the UK) roll-outs have been supported by Openreach’s (BT) deployment of ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) and some 330Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) technology, as well as a little work from alternative operators like Gigaclear, AB Internet, Call Flow and UKB Networks etc.

Future expansion beyond 95% will almost certainly involve greater input from alternative network (altnet) ISPs like those mentioned above, which is largely because BT would find it increasingly difficult to cater for such remote areas where the economic model can become prohibitively expensive for a traditional commercial operator.