Hundreds of Trees Pruned – Openreach Pull FTTP Broadband to Rural Cumbria

Hundreds of trees have been pruned back so that Openreach’s (BT) engineers could run 12km of overhead cabling to bring “ultrafast” Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband to around 480 premises in the rural Cumbria (England) villages of Crosthwaite, Underbarrow and Brigsteer.

We don’t often hear about Openreach running FTTP into remote rural villages (they tend to prefer the cheaper FTTC technology), although today’s news shows that it is still happening and in the middle of the Lake District National Park no less. As a result residents and businesses in the South Lakeland villages can now order download speeds of up to 330Mbps (rising to 1Gbps, once ISPs actually start to offer it).

Apparently the latest roll-out was partly funded by public investment from the regional Connecting Cumbria project, which is working to make “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services available to 95% of premises in the county by around mid-2018. So far 120,000 premises in Cumbria have benefited from this project (220,000 if you include BT’s commercial roll-out).

However, most of the above has been done with their slower ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) technology. By comparison this appears to be an uncommon example of an area where Openreach has found deploying FTTP to be more viable than FTTC.

Paul Cretney, BT Senior NGA Project Manager, said:

“Fibre-to-the-Premises technology is just one of the ways we can overcome the challenges of reaching more remote, less populated communities like Crosthwaite, Underbarrow and Brigsteer and demonstrates our commitment to making high-speed fibre broadband as widely available as possible.

They are just some of the communities across the county that have been connected up to high speed broadband using FTTP technology as part of the Connecting Cumbria project.”

Tim Farron, LibDem MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, said:

“This is great news for these villages. Access to top quality broadband is not only important for local residents, it is also vital for our local economy. It enables businesses based in villages in rural Cumbria to connect to the global economy, reaching new markets and helping to support local jobs.

Investing in broadband infrastructure will give a real boost to the local economy. It is vital that ultrafast broadband continues to be rolled out across the county, so that we can compete on the international stage.”

Openreach has also confirmed that their “ultrafast” FTTP service will be deployed to more of the surrounding area during Summer and Autumn 2017, although they don’t say precisely where. Sadly there’s also no information on how much this roll-out cost, particularly as pruning so many trees isn’t a small job.

One problem with this specific FTTP service is the lack of mainstream ISP support. Nearly all of the other major broadband providers have so far chosen to stick with their mass market hybrid-fibre (FTTC) and slow ADSL products (here), although you can buy Openreach based FTTP packages from BT itself or ISPs like Zen Internet, iDNET and AAISP etc.