A Curious Case of State Aid Fuelled Superfast Broadband Overbuild

An unusual case of overbuild has cropped up in Essex (England) after Openreach deployed a new superfast Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) network into an area that had already gained “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) speeds with the help of public investment and ultrafast FTTP. Both roll-outs are supported by the Superfast Essex project.

The Superfast Essex scheme is currently supported by Essex County Council (ECC), Openreach (BT), Gigaclear and the Government’s £1.6bn+ Broadband Delivery UK programme, which are all working to extend “superfast broadband” coverage to around 97% of the county by December 2019 (currently 93%+). After that the project also hopes to get as close to 100% coverage as possible by 2021.

As a general rule public money (state aid) should only be used to support a deployment where it’s actually needed. In other words, urban areas and those that can already get superfast speeds are usually excluded (i.e. they may have been upgraded via commercial investment or another project). This also assumes the local authority is aware of existing coverage via their most recent Open Market Review (OMR) process.

Admittedly there are already various examples where the state aid rules have been tested (just ask B4RN) and some degree of natural overbuild may even be expected at the very edges of a network, but today’s story is different to those and quite unusual.

In this case we have an area that was already upgraded to ultrafast FTTP broadband via Superfast Essex, but then Openreach returned to add superfast speeds via FTTC and seemingly with support from the same scheme. Thinkbroadband has spotted several such areas in Essex (e.g. Doe’s Corner, on the B1019 between Hatfield Peverel and Maldon), which are worth examining in case anybody has a similar query in the future.

The FTTP deployment in these areas is arguably a bit too extensive and specific to be natural overbuild at the edges of a network. Likewise some readers may rightly point out that the goal of expanding ‘superfast’ coverage via public investment may not be best served if they’re using it to support both technologies at superfast speeds in the same area.

Naturally we wanted to try and get the official view before writing about this and the Superfast Essex team have kindly obliged.

An Essex County Council Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Superfast Essex is legally bound by State Aid rules which prohibit any intentional overbuild where superfast broadband services already exist or are planned and this rule is strictly applied to all planned deployment. At Doe’s Corner, Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) was the only expected solution to be deployed to a number of premises here.

The cabinet, installed later to serve other addresses, was originally planned to be built elsewhere and would have been too far away to be able to achieve superfast speeds for Doe’s Corner. However, engineering reasons discovered after work started meant the cabinet had to be relocated, moving it closer to Doe’s Corner and subsequently intercepting additional cables including those already upgraded by the FTTP scheme.

Openreach has stopped a number of planned FTTP schemes in Essex where this type of potential overlap is identified early enough.”

Inevitably there will be situations like this and it’s important to stress that they do seem to be quite rare. On the upside we suspect that local residents will be happy to know that they now have a choice between both the older hybrid fibre FTTC network and FTTP, although they’re both on the same Openreach network. No doubt the latter will be the one that residents appreciate the most.

We should point out, just in case it wasn’t already obvious, that Openreach doesn’t really benefit from putting FTTC into an area where they’ve already deployed FTTP. In other words, it’s in their interests to avoid such cases.