Devon and Somerset UK MPs Call for Action After Broadband Delay

The fallout from Gigaclear’s admission that their state aid fuelled roll-out of 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP services under the Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) project was “significantly behind schedule” has continued this week, with several local MPs calling on the councils to take stronger action.

We don’t fancy re-hashing the original article so soon after it was posted (here) and so this will be a shortened summary. Suffice to say that CDS’s official response was to tell the ISP that they had to provide a “full remedial plan to improve its performance in each of the five CDS contract areas.” The CDS team promised to review that plan and would then decide whether or not the “extent of the delays expected are acceptable.”

“Given the importance of the outcome for our communities, all options will be carefully considered and any final decision will be taken in discussion with our funding partners,” said the CDS statement. Meanwhile Gigaclear pledged that their new plan would “re-energise this rollout programme.”

However a number of local MPs have now written an open letter to Devon Council’s Keri Denton (Head of Economy, Enterprise and Skills), which calls on her to take tougher action. In particular the letter, which is penned by Neil Parish MP (Member for Tiverton & Honiton), demands that CDS, “fund an interim solution, redeploy Gainshare funds and immediately extend the Voucher Scheme for our constituents. We cannot and will not continue to make excuses for the dire performance of CDS and its contractors.”

In reality the CDS project is somewhat stuck between a rock and a hard place, which means they can’t easily punish Gigaclear without potentially harming their own plans and possibly causing even more significant long term delays (e.g. having to re-start the procurement process all over again).

Lest we forget that Gigaclear only scooped the contract(s) after CDS rejected BT’s (Openreach) original proposal all the way back in 2015 (here), which leaves them with precious few alternative options and nobody wants to see another delay like that. This is why CDS will almost certainly agree to Gigaclear’s revised plan when it surfaces.

Meanwhile local residents will want some certainty that the ISP can actually deliver on whatever is promised, although complex FTTP centric civil engineering deployment targets will always be tentative ones and thus subject to change. This will be true of the revised roll-out plan too, although no doubt the ISP will be much more careful about any dates they set.