Openreach Community Fibre Partnerships Benefit 80000 UK Premises

The Community Fibre Partnerships scheme from Openreach (BT), which offers grants worth up to £30K to help co-fund the cost of upgrading a digitally isolated community to receive their FTTC or FTTP based superfast broadband ISP network, has now passed around 80,000 UK premises via 600 communities.

The grants are typically focused on smaller or more remote rural communities that don’t currently have access to an existing “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network and which may not benefit from one in the near future.

Essentially Openreach offers to cover up to three quarters of the cost of the new infrastructure (provided the area serves a local Ofsted registered (or equivalent) school or learning establishment) and then the community self-funds the remaining gap.

The grants themselves are worth up to a maximum of £30,000 and this comes from a pot of £2m. In addition, the CFP grants can also be combined with other broadband subsidy or voucher schemes, such as the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) or the Better Broadband Subsidy Scheme (BBSS) to help bring the total cost down. Some councils also do their own additional grants.

Apparently the 600th community to benefit will be the rural village of East Hagbourne in Oxfordshire (c.92 premises), which has made use of both Openreach’s grant and the GBVS for local businesses. The use of two grants appears to mean that the operator’s roll-out will be done “at no cost to people living there.”

Cordelia Gover, Parish Councillor and Broadband Co-Ordinator, said:

“After making contact with Oxfordshire County Council, they pointed me in the right direction for community schemes and government-backed Gigabit Voucher Scheme.

And once we took a closer look at the plans, we realised that because fibre cabling would be laid past the village school, we were eligible for Openreach’s own community grant scheme, covering most of the installation cost. We then discovered that because two local businesses were included in our scheme, we could also apply to the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, meaning we’d raised all the money we needed to go ahead.

I cannot thank our Openreach community liaison manager enough for her efficiency in pulling this huge project together. As a result, we are all now very excited about receiving our dramatic improvement in connection speeds!”

One other bit of good news about this deployment is that it will be done using their 1000Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology. We believe that around three quarters of CFP deployments make use of the slower hybrid fibre FTTC (VDSL2) solution, thus it’s always nice to see “full fibre” showing up.

Today’s news follows an earlier report from Regeneris Consulting, which estimated that the UK economic and social impacts generated by Openreach’s CFP could be worth around £340m over 15 years (here). On average, they estimated that £800,000 will be generated per CFP community, although there is significant variation depending on the size of economy and population.

We always recommend that any economic estimates about the impact of broadband should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least due to the notorious difficulty of creating a reliable prediction.