Devon and Somerset UK to Expand Rollout of Superfast Broadband

The £171 million Connecting Devon and Somerset project in England has announced that their existing contracts with wireless ISP Airband and “full fibre” (FTTP) provider Gigaclear are set to be extended, which could result in an extra 9,000 rural homes and businesses being reached.

At present Airband holds two contracts under the CDS programme. The first £4.6m deal (here) has seen them deploying “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) to 5,800 premises in the Dartmoor and Exmoor National Parks. The second £7m contract (here) focuses on expanding their fixed wireless network to a further 13,000 premises in rural parts of Northern, Central and West Devon.

Similarly Gigaclear has secured several phase 2 contracts (here and here) that will support the expansion of their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) network to reach over 41,000 premises across parts of both counties by the end of December 2019 (Airband are working to a similar time-scale).

The good news is that CDS has received Government approval to expand their existing deal with Gigaclear, which will see a further 6,000 homes and businesses in hard to reach parts of the two counties gaining access to their FTTP network by December 2020. No details about cost or investment have been shared.

On top of that the CDS programme has confirmed that they are “finalising a bid to Government” for approval to expand their deal with Airband even further, which should result in the operator’s wireless network being extended to cover a further 3,000 premises in parts of Northern and West Devon by the end of 2020.

Joe Frost, Business Development Director at Gigaclear, said:

“We’re delighted to once again expand our network in the South West and it’s fantastic to secure further funding allowing Gigaclear to bring ultrafast, full fibre broadband to even more homes and business across the county. It’s only right that more residents get the opportunity to experience the benefits of full fibre-to-the-premises broadband and this further investment helps to secure the UK’s digital economy, especially in rural locations.”

Redmond Peel, Managing Director of Airband, said:

“With our work in Dartmoor and Exmoor almost complete and the build now underway in Devon, the prospect of being able to help even more homes and businesses to get connected is really exciting. Both Devon and the wider UK initiative to ensure rural and hard to reach areas receive fast, reliable broadband is really working, and now accelerating, and we’re delighted to be a part of it.”

So far the existing CDS supported deployments, which were largely conducted alongside BT (Openreach) until the new Phase 2 programme began, have resulted in more than 250,000 additional premises across the two counties gaining access to superfast broadband than would have otherwise occurred.

Confusingly the exact coverage statistics seem to vary, depending upon which CDS press releases you read (the current “superfast” figure under the contract could be 282,000.. if confirmed), which is an example of how some projects can suffer from confused messaging (examples here and here).

This of course comes before we get into the endlessly annoying aspect of politicians using the raw “fibre” footprint (at any speed) coverage instead of the figure for pure “superfast” reach.

Matt Hancock, Minister for Digital, said:

“We want everyone in the UK to have access to fast and reliable broadband, and the Connecting Devon and Somerset project has already made this a reality for more than 320,000 local properties who would otherwise have been left behind. But we know there’s still more to do, and I’m delighted that our investment will now take gold standard, full fibre broadband, to over 40,000 extra homes and businesses across the region.”

Sadly the CDS project, which until very recently had an “ambition” to provide “speeds of over 24Mbps to 100% of premises by 2020“, has in the past year shied away from giving a clear percentage figure for their expected coverage of superfast broadband under the new Airband and Gigaclear contracts. Premise counts are all very well but they don’t tell us much about how close to that ambition CDS will be at the end of 2020 (maybe that’s the point).

Nevertheless it’s important to remember that Devon and Somerset are quite rural counties, which has made it very challenging to deploy the new services and is one of the main reasons why such a large amount of funding is involved (CDS is the biggest public-funded broadband programme in England).

Meanwhile we should add that the gainshare (clawback) from BT’s original Phase 1 CDS contract (i.e. public subsidy returned by BT due to increased take-up of services delivered under the contract) is also due to be reinvested in order to further increase the coverage of superfast broadband in the counties. CDS said there is a “discussion about the final amount” and have not yet confirmed a solid plan or time-scale for this.