BT Expect “Majority” of Future Fibre Rollout in Northumberland to Use FTTP

Mole ploughs to fishing rods, those are just some of the methods that Openreach (BT) have been using to roll-out “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) across Northumberland. The operator has today also revealed that 1Gbps capable FTTP “will make up the vast majority” of their future deployment.

At present the iNorthumberland project, which is supported by the local council, BT and the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme, has already expanded their ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) dominated network to an additional 150,000 premises in the county (i.e. 580 street cabinets and 1700km of fibre); this includes 2,500 premises that have been delivered via their Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) tech.

The result is that over 90% of local homes and businesses can now access a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network (95%+ if you include the sub-24Mbps “fibre” footprint) and around 7,000 extra premises are currently being added through additional contracts / extensions (details). The good news is that the “vast majority” of the remaining work should benefit from ultrafast FTTP.

One of the reasons for that has to do with how much of the remaining deployment consists of sparsely-populated rural areas, as well as national parks, ponds full of great crested newts and areas of archaeological significance (e.g. Hadrian’s Wall and Berwick Bridge). All of these things can create delays and increasingly the operator has been finding that FTTP is now the “best solution to reach remote and scattered communities.”

Mike Reynolds, Openreach Spokesperson for the North East, said:

“All the things that make Northumberland such an incredible place to live and work are also the things that make this roll-out difficult. In a large town or city a new fibre cabinet can be relatively simple to build and can provide services to hundreds of people. In Northumberland a cabinet can take months of planning followed by months of civil engineering and the end result may only be providing faster broadband to a handful of people. But for those people it’s absolutely vital this work takes place.

In most areas, we try to take advantage of our existing underground network wherever possible, but often in Northumberland there’s no existing network where we need it, so we have to start from scratch. On country lanes this frequently involves traffic management or road closures and in very remote locations getting power to the new fibre cabinets can be extremely challenging.

In the most rural communities we began changing our approach and we’re increasingly using Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) ultrafast broadband technology, where fibre travels direct to the property without the need for a fibre cabinet. Thanks to innovations in equipment and creative planning this technology is now available to more than 2,500 homes and businesses in Northumberland and will make up the vast majority of the future roll-out.”

Apparently some of the locations expected to benefit from this ultrafast broadband technology, which can deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps (more affordable domestic connections currently only go up to 330Mbps), include Wooperton, Hepple, Chathill, Guyzance and areas around Slaley and Bardon Mill.

It’s refreshing to hear Openreach talking about FTTP in such a positive tone, which appears to highlight an on-going shift in their strategy. Indeed until recently BT were still very much focused on deploying their cheaper and slower FTTC technology, but times are changing.

Last month BT even began hinting that their planned deployment of FTTP to 2 million UK premises by 2020 (i.e. mostly new build homes and businesses) could potentially be expanded to 10 million by around 2025, albeit somewhat depending upon the position of rival ISPs, Government and of course favourable market regulation from Ofcom (here).

On the other hand it remains to be seen whether this sort of approach will also affect the operator’s other BDUK based contracts across the United Kingdom. Northumberland has already had quite a bit of FTTP via the BDUK programme and so it’s perhaps somewhat of a unique case, but we’d be happy to see more of the same in other parts of the UK.

Elsewhere the operator has highlighted how they’re making use of new engineering equipment, such as Mole Ploughing that can be used to dig channels in soft unsurfaced areas such as grass verges (i.e. it digs a trench, lays a ready-made fibre filled duct and then closes the trench all in one). We’ve seen some smaller community FTTP/H deployments use this a lot.

On top of that a “stronger, pre-prepared cable” has also been developed, which can be pushed through existing cable ducts, clearing minor blockages as it goes (i.e. saving time and the need to re-build damaged sections of existing duct). Engineers also have the option of using overhead fibre cables and tackling hard ground with rock hammers, which enable telegraph poles to be erected in locations where previously it would have been very difficult. As a more unorthodox example, Openreach even used a fishing rod to get fibre across the River Till at Crookham.