Essex UK Council Target 100% Coverage of Superfast Broadband by 2021

The Essex County Council (ECC) in England has unveiled details of their final Phase 4 contract under the Superfast Essex project, which could be supported by up to £29 million of public investment and aims to reach “near” to 100% coverage of “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) by 2021.

At present around 90% of local homes and businesses in Essex can already access a “superfast fibre broadband” network (mostly FTTC and a bit of FTTP), with 85,000 premises having benefited as a direct result of the state aid supported Phase 1 contract with Openreach (BT). A Phase 2 contract is also underway with BT and aims to extend that coverage to a total of 120,000 premises (i.e. 95% of premises by mid-2019).

In addition to the above, Gigaclear won the Phase 2b ‘Rural Challenge Project’ (£5.5m from Gigaclear and £2m of public money), which supports a roll-out of their 1Gbps ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network to cover 4,545 premises in the Epping Forest area of Essex by the end of 2017.

More recently both Gigaclear and BT have also won the Phase 3 contract (here), which should reach a further 24,000 premises (total of 144,000) and push local coverage of superfast broadband to around 97% by December 2019. So far about 90,000 of the expected deployment has already completed and 46% of the properties enabled in Phase 1 have ordered a related “fibre broadband” service.

The good news is that the ECC has this week taken the decision to proceed with a future Phase 4 contract, which is expected to be the final one and it will naturally target universal coverage!

Kevin Bentley, Deputy Council Leader, said:

“We have an ambition to become one of the best connected counties in the UK as we recognise the importance superfast broadband has for residents and businesses alike. Essex is a fast-growing county which makes achieving close to 100% coverage no mean feat but the County Council remains committed to improving the availability of broadband and considers it one of our priorities to invest in.”

Apparently Phase 4 will be funded by “project savings and subsidy refunds” (clawback / gainshare), which reflects public money that will be returned by BT under Phase 1 + 2 and reinvested. On top of that there will be further contributions by local councils, a new grant from the government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme (BDUK) and the ECC hopes to apply for further government grants that could be worth up to £18 million.

Assuming all of the aforementioned investment can be gathered then it’s predicted that Phase 4 might have an overall value (public investment) of up to £29 million, which the council would then expect to be complemented by private investment from suppliers. Superfast Essex now plans to begin the tender process for Phase 4 during October 2017.

The project team are planning to update their broadband maps in due course, which will identify the areas that are eligible to be included in the Phase 4 roll-out.